February 9th, 2006

Dynamic Reading Lists

by Joshua Porter  |   8 Comments  |  shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/342

Adam Green:

“There are plenty of RSS aggregators that allow you to import OPML files as a quick way of subscribing to a large number of feeds, but these are basically a static form of subscription. BlogBridge, on the other hand, is able to stay in synch with the original OPML.”

I’ve been using Blogbridge for a few days now, after talking about them with Adam over sushi, and I can say that dynamic OPML reading lists are really cool. However, because they are OPML they are working at the feed level, and at this point I think I’m more interested in the post level.

Adam has set up a dynamic OPML reading list of Tech.memeorandum created from an hourly check-in of the popular meme tracker site. So, every hour the OPML updates to show all the blogs that have bubbled to the homepage of memeorandum. So this is totally cool.

However, the blogs got there because of some really interesting post, because they’re somehow related to the top stories of the day. In other words, the blogs themselves may or may not be interesting to me other than their one, attention-getting post. So OPML might not be the best solution at this level. So the question is: are reading lists dynamic? Or is it simply news headlines that are?

Going forward, my guess is that we’ll be more interested in the post-level relevance, as opposed to feed-level relevance. Or, perhaps that’s easy for me to say because I already feel like I have enough feeds to read (about 200). But I think it makes sense that way, because we read many, many more individual posts than we acquire new feeds, and we’re more interested in the relevance of the information than what feed they come from. Acquiring new feeds is slow, reading the news is not.

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Comments

1.  Marshall Kirkpatrick 1:20pm, Thu 9th, 2006

This is well put. There was some interesting discussion about reading memorandum via feed on the latest Gilmor Gang too. It seems we’re getting closer to a satisfactory solution.

To be honest I still think static OPML files are very important in certain circomstances. For example, I recently scraped the news pages of 4 or 5 international free speech advocacy groups that didn’t have feeds and posted those in an OPML format.

But I would like to see something that combines the meme finding idea of memorandum with the link tracking possibilities of technorati and the perishability of feeds that Nicole Simon of Bloxpert mentioned in a recent podcast interview with Bloglines’
Mark Fletcher last month. She asked why feeds couldn’t be subscribed to on a perishable basis. After a short period of time subscribers would be asked if they wish to remain subscribed to the feed – otherwise it would be deleted. But all of this being based on posts not feeds as the basic unit sounds like a very good option to have.

2.  Matt Terenzio 1:42pm, Thu 9th, 2006

Josh raises some good questions here. I don’tr completely agree but I’m not sure we disagree either. Another way to look at reading lists here.

3.  matt 6:03pm, Thu 9th, 2006

There is another cool news and blog aggregrator, Megite

4.  Danny 1:37pm, Fri 10th, 2006

You have a good point. I would suggest the solution to relevance in this situation is to gather as much information as is available about the memeorandum post, going well beyond just the URI of the target blog. There’s no reason that the computer couldn’t also get the tags/categories of the post in question, query on them in del.cio.us and return related items. Or grab the XFN/FOAF profile of the person that made the post, and see if they and yourself have any friends in common or…

Although the notion of reading lists does bring the dynamic nature of the material to the fore, OPML isn’t adequate for representing the variety of information that is potentially available. I would recommend Semantic Web technologies, which were have been designed explicitly for the purpose of knowledge representation on the web. I’ll also note in passing that BlogDigger already provides an OCS representation of (potentially dynamic) feed groups which could be immediately integrated with material like FOAF.