Reading the news

I’m currently thinking about Atom, RSS, OPML and such-like bases of Feed Readers. This quote seems very appropriate:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it

Herbert Simon

 

So, I think these feeds fall into 3 groups -

 

1. Rubbish

 

These are feeds to items which are essentially static. For example, in relation to topic X, you get a Wikipeadia article on X.  Such items entail a basic misunderstanding of what a feed is, and confuse such a thing with a normal HTML link. Someone interested in X might bookmark the site, but they won’t want their feedreader continually showing this to them.

 

I have an idea this is being intentionally misused to simply increase traffic to a site. Changing the pubDate field on the item makes it look like something new, so the FeedReader will push it in the face of the unsuspecting user. But of course not for long.

 

2. Feeds coming from blogs

 

The very name of BlogBridge implies people want to check out very quickly new posts to blogs (like this one). Now I think most bloggers write meditative(ish) pieces after some thought, and should be read in a leisurely manner for entertainment or long term enlightenment- in other words, the way you read a magazine. So this gives a metaphor for BlogBridge – that of a magazine, except that it is personalized.

 

3. News feeds

 

These are items which are only significant because of their timeliness. Now I think these are actually pretty rare in general. However in the case of finance news it is standard. If I hear that oil exploration company Y has discovered large reserves in say the south Atlantic,  I need that within minutes – tomorrow the share price will have adjusted.

 

So this is a different metaphor for a feed reader – that of a newspaper. Only this is personalised, larger and much much faster. This is the bees knees.

 

What do you think?