Memeorandum and the Future of RSS
It wasn’t so long ago that I was claiming to get my news via only two websites (Slashdot and Google News). Ah, how times have changed. Now I’m engaged in a constant battle to whittle my blogroll down to only 54 feeds since that’s the most that will fit on one screen in Bloglines (even when using my Sidebar Squeezer). Even this is frankly far too much for me to keep up with, and I’m not alone in this respect. The supersimple approach used by RSS and newsreaders has served it well in the early adopter market, but it’s clearly hitting its limits.
Meanwhile, something new and wonderful has happened, giving us a preview of what the next generation of newsreaders should look like. Memeorandum is revolutionary because it displays blog entries in a manner that is far more expressive than the humdrum linear chronology of Bloglines and friends, exploiting our oversized virtual cortices to optimize the information flow into our brains. The most topical and popular posts are bigger and displayed at the top of the page. Related posts are displayed in a collapsible hierarchy, so we can follow the conversations that underlie so much blog traffic. And posts are filtered and ranked by demosophia.
The result is so compelling that I find myself returning to the site constantly, even though I subscribe to the RSS feed. The dumbed down syndicated version just doesn’t do it justice. The only problem is that it doesn’t know anything about me, me, me. Ross Mayfield nails it when he suggests that they “let me filter using my social network, even if it’s uploading my subscriptions.” A blended view of my personal selections with the best of the web, with the same visually efficient presentation of today’s Memeorandum… that’s the future of RSS, and I need it now.
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organise your feeds into folders and set bloglines so that it only shows feeds that have new content.
Comment by R Pollack — 11/3/2005 @ 8:56 pm
Yeah, but that would mess up my blogroll, since it’s generated automatically by Bloglines. In any case, the main point isn’t fitting all the feeds on one screen, it filtering the information so the cream floats to the top.
Comment by Matt — 11/3/2005 @ 11:20 pm
The URI is to Zesty News, a desktop/browser based feedReader that learns your prefered feeds and floats them to the top with related topics grouped beneath.
Zesty is in holding in ‘alpha’ testing while it’s developer, Kevin Dangoor polishes up TurboGears, which he developed as a tool to work on it.
Comment by Robt.D.McKenzie — 11/7/2005 @ 9:04 pm
RSS Feeds Go Crazy in the Marketplace
Geeks and Bloggers use RSS exclusively for the publishing and subscribing to news headlines and blog feeds, however many other innovative and useful applications of RSS have been sprouting up here and there.
Trackback by Rss Feeds And Podcasts — 3/5/2008 @ 12:11 am