Comments on: A Scenario about What Goes On when You’re Using a Feed Reader

By: house of the hanged man

house of the hanged man — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:04:03 +0000

Joshua at Bokardo thinking about attention (but not attention.xml – yet)

I’ve been really digging a lot of what Joshua Porter says over at Bokardo (and I really like the layout and interface of his site). But here’s a timely tale: Hereâ€™s a scenario sure to be familiar to most of you:Youâ€™re in your feed reader, and yo…

By: David Hain

David Hain — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:55:35 +0000

I am probably subscribed to a relatively small number of feeds. I try to keep the number down so I’m not spending all my time in the reader. This forces me to filter feeds by site, which probably isn’t ideal, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make because in my experience, certain sites consistently publish good material. (This one, I’m subscribed to. Keep up the good work!)

Even still, I couldn’t read every article from every site I’m subscribed to, so I do end up filtering further. When I open my reader, I skim titles. Titles are probably the most important attention-getter in a feed reader context. If the title gets my attention, then I’ll skim whatever content shows up in my reader, be it an excerpt or the full article. If it’s an excerpt or a long article, I’ll open my browser, but if it’s short, like this one, I’ll probably read it in the feed reader.

By: cori schlegel

cori schlegel — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:48:32 +0000

Good post, and timely.

As I suspect you may be aware, Steve Gillmor is doing a lot of thinking and gathering about this topic, enlisting some of the Technorati-folk (notably Dave Sifry and Tantek Çelik) to create a spec around the idea (http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/attentionxml).

Tools are not there yet, but it’s getting a lot of “attention” (ha!). I’m not convinced that it’ll be a panacea for the problem of finite attention, but I know that Steve and some of his converts seem to be. I haven’t seen the format implemented enough to be able to tell what it’ll be capable of. One place you can see it in action is in Yahoo!’s MyWeb (http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myweb), but only via a url-hack (go to the RSS view of one of your folders and change the ending from rss.xml to attention.xml).