Idle Thoughts

Any new technology will eventually have social elements arbitrarily grafted on, it’s the way of today’s web. To an extent, this makes sense; people are becoming more social, and want to share most of what they do online, but it’s important to consider the way in which social elements are implemented.

Social feed readers have been around for almost as long as RSS, usually allowing users of a particular feed reader to discuss a post amongst themselves. This isn’t a particularly user-friendly system of commenting because it isolates the commenters from the primary discussion - the one occuring on the blog. This brings me to my point:

Feed reader comments are implemented this way because it is almost impossible to integrate with blogs. Everyone uses a different commenting system, not all blogs provide a feed of comments or otherwise make their comments accessible, and none that I know of provide the ability to comment from a third party site.

Ideally, a feed reader would display all comments for a post, along with a comment form to allow the reader to join in without leaving the page. Unfortunately, for such a feed reader to ever become a reality, there would have to be no more than a few comment standards, preferably just one, used by the vast majority of sites.

This standardization of commenting systems is gradually becoming a reality with services like Disqus and IntenseDebate, but these offer no extended functionality; they would need to provide the ability to post comments from a third party site to enable such an idealized feed reader.

This may seem like a lot of trouble, and it is, but it would be very beneficial to all concerned. Users would be able to add their comments, and read others’, without having to visit every individual site, and blogs would gain more comments by feed subscribers, who are likely among their more devoted followers, adding value to their stories.

This isn’t likely to occur for some time yet, but it would only take one platform creating a standard to kick start the change. WordPress, I’m looking at you.

APIs, Blogs, Feed Readers, RSS

CES is killing me.

I subscribe to forty feeds. Most of them are social media or technology blogs, and every single one of them feels the need to help spread the word on the latest gadgets on display.

In the past two days, I’ve accumulated fifty nine posts about the Palm Pre. It’s a great phone, and I was very excited to read the first post. But that’s all I needed. The other fifty eight were, by and large, a waste of my time.

This is an extreme example, but it’s a problem I face constantly. Because all of the blogsI read report on similar industries, there is a good deal of overlap between them. It’s a problem, however, with a seemingly simple solution: a semantic feed reader.

There are a number of attempts to solve this problem, but they’re all overthinking it. Voting systems and other attempts at socializing the system are unnecessary - all that’s needed is keyword matching. After I read an article on a particular product or topic, all articles that come in within the next day or two on the same topic are filed away in a ‘more info’ archive, sorted by keyword.

This isn’t to say it would be an easy product to build, but far more complex semantic systems exist, so why not this one?

Please, somebody, build me a semantic feed reader!

Feed Readers, RSS, Semantic Web