In the past week much has been written about extending the idea of Shared Feeds that you can create and make available for others using Google Reader or even a standalone RSS client like FeedDemon. It is because of some great posts by Louis Gray that we have found out about two such Shared Feed extenders – ReadBurner and Shared Reader.
Both of these feed aggregating services offer us all a great way to bring the diversity of the blogosphere that shared feeds offer. Rick Mahn also had a good post today about the advantages he sees this idea of things like ReadBurner and aggregators like it brings to the blogging table.
For me though these services aren’t the answer. As great as the idea is the biggest flaw I see with this aggregating of already aggregated feeds is the signal to noise ratio. I already subscribe to several shared feeds along with offering my own and the thing about them all; mine included to be honest, is that the reader may – if they are lucky – find one, two or three posts from these feeds of any interest – the rest is just noise; and if you have ever subscribed to Robert Scoble’s Link blog (no offence Robert 
) you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Even my shared feed is filled with esoteric things that I find of interest and feel like sharing just because I find them interesting. That doesn’t mean that anyone else will find even one story out the the ones I post to the shared feed of interest.
For me part of the reason for blogging is the sharing and discussion of ideas but when you are faced with the massive inundation of verbal diarrhea that can come with an ever increasing number of posts, the truth is that ideas simple get lost in the noise. Through it all though I keep coming back to a concept I first wrote about last August called Ideastreaming; where the ability to create a constantly updating RSS feed based on keywords or tags would bring you the information; regardless of who wrote about it, you wanted. This way rather than having to sift through the noise before you can even get to a point of figuring out the value of what you have you are starting with the conversations you want to be a part of or read about.
Tags are the key to ideastreaming, the key for you to create the feeds you want based on ideas or conversations about ideas you are interested. Central to this I have always felt was Technorati as they had everything in place to be able to bring it all together and provide bloggers with a truly excellent service – even more important than their so-called ranking authority system. However as I pointed out in a follow up post this feature of creating RSS feeds based on tags was nowhere to be found.
To their credit Ian Kellan from Technorati did comment on that post saying that …”Ack! I think that’s a bug. I don’t recall an explicit decision to disable it. I’ll find out.” and when I checked recently it appears this is indeed the fact as you can create a feed based on a single tag or on one that you have entered in their Advanced Search page.
Why is this important?
Because ideas are bigger than individual people, conversations are bigger than any A-List, B-List or take your pick of rankings. Being able to tap into conversations based on their tags or idea markers is far more powerful that any collection of aggregated posted by individual bloggers.
While the current implementation used on Technorati for creating tag based RSS feeds works I believe that there is a lot more they could do with the concept. Technorati is based on the use of tags after all we see them on just about 99% of all tech related blogs. They are the backbone of ideastreaming and if Technorati put some real effort and thought into expanding this conversation backbone of blogging they could very well find themselves back as the go to place once again.
It is one thing to search blogs – any search engine can do that all with varying degrees of competency but to be able to be the breeding ground of ideas and conversations – well that is a different ball game entirely and right now it’s an open field with Technorati having just the barest of edge on everyone else.
I'll admit to a large flaw in shared feeds – and one that I pointed out as a positive. The fact that you are dependent on the person sharing posts in the feed picks content compatible with your needs.
It's a tough question, and I've seen the same noise in shared feeds that you have. Whether their Robert Scoble's or Chris Brogan's – both of whom are diligent in sharing posts that are relevent to their areas of expertise and interest – still have some noise in their shared feeds, simply because of their personal interests and perspectives.
This is either annoying, or can be positive, depending on how you want to look at it. Sometimes I enjoy getting a post in a shared feed that I would not have found before, and streatches my perceptions of the world or my opinion of things. On the other hand, it's a distraction in a busy day that I would not like to have encountered. Not sure how to categorize that yet.
Still, I agree that it boils down to sharing things that are important to you, and not worrying if they're important to others. If the content has value, it'll get used in this great social roller coaster ride as we define the new constructs of our society.
Regards,
Rick
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I think the point of aggregation is that over time we might see things in aggregate, and not from indivdual people. We are at the first step where we are noting intrest by shareing. The next step will be to add some inteligent aggregation based of preferences. We have stop thinking about all of this information as something that is flowing from one person to another. We will see the most use from things like this when the information is flowing from many to many.
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The thing is Rick is that with shared feeds you will find that whose ever feed you are getting that they typically will have the same people in there. It is very rare that after a certain point of getting that shared feed that you will see anything new in regards to posters. It's human nature to deal with the one's you know.
So while Robert as an example may have an extremely wide ranging shared feed there will come a point where the contents become redundant as others add the same feeds.
The advantage of ideastreaming based on tags is that it is the idea not the person that you are getting the feed for. Say you had a feed based on blogs + social Networks + Web 2.0 with a parameter of high authority. That feed could contain literally hundreds of posts from people you may never have heard of before but have some great things to add to the conversation.
Now which would you want to use to increase your knowledge or range of conversational partners?
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the problem I have Alex is that Shared Feeds or Link blogs are based strickly on me and others posting to a “repository” links to blogs we found interesting. I am not suggesting that that doesn't have value or should be ignored.
All I am putting forth is that when your river of information is based on an idea or a conversation that has been delineated by a tag or series of tags you are removing the individual biasis from the equation and are dealing with the ideas.
As I said to Rick above ultimately it is the ideas and the conversations around them that is important not the people who are having them per se. Sure you have to have the person to have the discussion but in our world today certain people carry more weight regardless of what they say and can there for affect the conversation – when it is the idea that should have the weight.
When the idea has the weight then our sphere from which we can pull pieces of the conversation is greatly expanded – well beyond any point that a “person” driven conversation could go.
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I like the idea of <ahem> ideastreaming. I use my news aggregator to aggregate <ahem again> news.
I like how I can enter topics that are of interest to me into google news and then generate an RSS feed for that search. Employment sites will also generate a search specific RSS feed. I've often thought it odd that google doesn't offer the same service for its regular search. Admittedly, one would need to be fairly precise with one's search terms, but I'd think most web savvy RSS users would be up to it.
I see that on wordpress.com, you can create an RSS feed for tags. Also del.icio.us allows RSS creation for tags, that although this post shows 1 save there, ideastreaming doesn't show up on a tag search.
You are all over the page for ideastreaming on technorati, but as you pointed out, no RSS creation facility.
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Digg does it too. The big fear I'd have about this catching on is that it wouldn't be to difficult for an <ahem> evil mind to conjure up ways to tag spam.
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Actually pB there are two ways you can make an RSS feed for tags on Technorati at the moment.
Easy Way:
- Got to http://technorati.com/technology/
- On the far right side of the page you will see Tags from what’s rising
- For example sake click on the blogging tag
- You will then transfer (or should) to http://technorati.com/tag/blogging
- In the upper right corner of the page – right across from the headline listing how many posts are tagged with blogging you will see the RSS button with Subscribe beside it
- Now before subscribing using the provided link in the area just under the Post Tag title you will see the drop down list which is where you can specify the authority you want for the feed.
A way to build a more complex type of Tag RSS feed is to switch to the Advance Search page and scroll down the the Tag Search Section. In the area provided just create the search string that includes the tags you want – i.e.: blogs OR Facebook OR Social Networks .
then click the search button and the resulting page from the search will also have that same RSS subscribe button.
This though IMO is the one area that Technorati needs to do some really serious work but if they do it right they could literally change the face of how we use our RSS readers.
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I think the point of aggregation is that over time we might see things in aggregate, and not from indivdual people. We are at the first step where we are noting intrest by shareing. The next step will be to add some inteligent aggregation based of preferences. We have stop thinking about all of this information as something that is flowing from one person to another. We will see the most use from things like this when the information is flowing from many to many.
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Actually pB there are two ways you can make an RSS feed for tags on Technorati at the moment.
Easy Way:
- Got to http://technorati.com/technology/
- On the far right side of the page you will see Tags from what’s rising
- For example sake click on the blogging tag
- You will then transfer (or should) to http://technorati.com/tag/blogging
- In the upper right corner of the page – right across from the headline listing how many posts are tagged with blogging you will see the RSS button with Subscribe beside it
- Now before subscribing using the provided link in the area just under the Post Tag title you will see the drop down list which is where you can specify the authority you want for the feed.
A way to build a more complex type of Tag RSS feed is to switch to the Advance Search page and scroll down the the Tag Search Section. In the area provided just create the search string that includes the tags you want – i.e.: blogs OR Facebook OR Social Networks .
then click the search button and the resulting page from the search will also have that same RSS subscribe button.
This though IMO is the one area that Technorati needs to do some really serious work but if they do it right they could literally change the face of how we use our RSS readers.
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I can somewhat agree with you. Apps like ReadBurner aren't something I'd subscribe to. But I wouldn't subscribe to TechMeme, either. It gives me an overview of what the web looks like. But whereas TechMeme is influenced by the way bloggers link to each other, ReadBurner is influenced by what the readers think is important.
This poses challenges – as the service grows, Alexander Marktl will have to think carefully about how to prevent spammers from using the service. But on the other hand, it will support real journalism (rather than just linking to popular TechCrunch-articles and being shown in the long tail of a TC-post).
But there's something more important: ReadBurner provides the interface to Google Reader that they should have developed themselves. It has the potential of creating customized ReadBurner-pages, where only the stories count that your friends shared with you. Something that TechMeme can't ever do.
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I can somewhat agree with you. Apps like ReadBurner aren't something I'd subscribe to. But I wouldn't subscribe to TechMeme, either. It gives me an overview of what the web looks like. But whereas TechMeme is influenced by the way bloggers link to each other, ReadBurner is influenced by what the readers think is important.
This poses challenges – as the service grows, Alexander Marktl will have to think carefully about how to prevent spammers from using the service. But on the other hand, it will support real journalism (rather than just linking to popular TechCrunch-articles and being shown in the long tail of a TC-post).
But there's something more important: ReadBurner provides the interface to Google Reader that they should have developed themselves. It has the potential of creating customized ReadBurner-pages, where only the stories count that your friends shared with you. Something that TechMeme can't ever do.
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[...] Shared Feeds – The discussion continues Blogging friend Steven Hodson takes a good look at the ongoing discussion of shared feeds. He also gives a good explanation of why they are but one part of the RSS/feed experience. (tags: rss feeds winextra steven hodson feed reader) [...]
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[...] I wrote about how I felt that this new obsession with shared feeds and the new services that are aggregating them [...]
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