Tuesday, April 22, 2003

RSS assimilmation observations

I've been playing with NewzCrawler for a few days, and previously explored Syndirella. I'm gradually migrating from my earlier news/etc. scan modus operandi (hitting a couple dozen Web sites and blogs every day) to a model centered around an RSS reader. A few semi-random observations:
1. The "standards" either aren't quite done yet and/or aren't widely/consistently followed. Many of the RSS feeds I try to add to NewzCrawler return errors.
2. There's a lot of great user experience/interface innovation in this context -- both NewzCrawler and Syndirella are refreshing examples.
3. This wave is happening in a very timely manner -- I was starting to get very frustrated with the signal-to-noise ratio, with my earlier modus operandi; e.g., the simple unread indicators in RSS readers save a lot of time (compared with brute-force browsing/foraging for new articles/posts).
4. There are still lots of rough edges, e.g., NewzCrawler has a very cool ability to post via Blogger's BlogThis! UI, but I can't find an option for including titles -- so Blogger posts I make with NewzCrawler won't show up in my RSS feed unless I manually add the titles before publishing...

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