Things to do with RSS readers...
When I was in Helsinki, I started thinking about RSS aggregators like NewNewsWire. More particularly I started to think about what extra functionality they should be able to provide.
Personal Blogdex: Here's the most obvious idea. You have a whole set of feeds, all of which are time-limited (ie. things expire) and everything's in a machine-readable format, and yet these readers don't do anything with the data apart from display it. There doesn't seem to be any specific reason why this is the case. So here's my first suggestion:
A pane that collates and displays the most popular links that your feeds have referenced. A personal Blogdex...
Suggested Weblogs: Again - NetNewsWire can export OPML lists of your subscriptions (and you can stick that online if you like) - but it doesn't do anything with the lists that are being put online by other sites. It seems to me entirely possible to reference an OPML file in your own RSS feed (or even include it in your feed) in such a way that an RSS reader could read it. I don't know whether or not NetNewsWire could realistically be set to upload an OPML file to a server (although Kung-Tunes has no trouble), but it could still read things put online by more human means. And that leads me to my second suggestion:
A pane that collates and displays the most popular weblogs that the people you subscribe to are themselves subscribed to...
More RSS, subscriptions and NetNewsWire stuff:
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
There is a presupposition under this about the way you select your feeds, which may not apply to everybody. Personally, I regularly cull those that seem to repeat ideas I've found elsewhere, in order to manage my information flow. The fact that two bloggers regularly reference the same third blogger would lead me to either cull one of them, or cull both in favour of the third. Perhaps reference-based rankings could be used to automatically lead the user to the original sources of ideas in this way?
→ Posted by: Ian at July 13, 2003 3:29 PM
Tom -- both are good ideas. As aggregators mature they'll get more and more features like that. It's just a matter of time and feature priorities. Everything takes time to design, develop, and test, so some good ideas have to wait sometimes.
→ Posted by: Brent Simmons at July 13, 2003 7:07 PM
Sorry Brent! I certainly wasn't implying any slackness on your part - I was just trying to think about what happened next...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at July 13, 2003 7:21 PM
I'm not sure (I'm a long way from home), but I *think* NewsMonster has features that match what you've asked for (although the suggested weblogs feature actually works by comparing other newsmonster readers' lists with your own).
As you can probably tell, I didn't play with them enough to get much utility out of them. But maybe you should tell Kevin about your ideas.
→ Posted by: Danny at July 13, 2003 8:49 PM
You guys are so cute... NewsMonster has been doing this for months! Where have you been!
:)
For an example...
http://feeds.archive.org/newsmonster/burtonator/
Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Over the next few weeks you are going to see some amazing functionality integrated into NewsMonster which is based on my research around reputation systems...
Be afraid... be very afraid :)
Peace!
Kevin
→ Posted by: Kevin Burton at July 15, 2003 6:55 AM