This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Worrying too much
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
The irony of RSS's success though is that this same success may ultimately contribute to its failure. To understand why this might be the case, it helps to imagine the RSS community as a giant Cable TV operator. From this perspective, RSS has now has tens of thousands of channels and will probably hundreds of thousands of channels by the end of the year. While some of the channels are branded, most are little known blogs and websites. Now imagine that you want to tune into channels about, let's say, Cricket. Sure there will probably be a few channels with 100% of their content dedicated to Cricket, but most of the Cricket information will inevitably be spread out in bits and pieces across the 100,000's of channels. Thus, in order to get all of the Cricket information you will have to tune into hundreds, if not thousands, of channels and then try to filter out all the "noise" or irrelevant programs that have nothing to do with Cricket. That's a lot of channel surfing!
There are a number of things wrong with this theory - first and foremost, it forgets the critical role of the end user. I subscribe to new feeds all the time. If the author of that feed keeps pushing out stuff I don't care about, I can do one of two things:
Apply filters at the client (aggregator) side to eliminate the things I don't like
Just unscubscribe from the feed in question
It may be difficult to find new feeds of interest - but the same problem exists in lots of other places as well:
Books. There are loads of books published every year. How do I know which ones to look at? To a large extent, experience (looking for new works by authors I already like) and word of mouth. The same thing happens in feed-space - BlogRolls and links do the job.
TV shows. Not as many new ones as books, but lots every day over digital cable. We have the Replay doing what amounts to keyword search, and we talk to friends.
The same sorts of things are happening in RSS. Why is this hard to figure out? There are already millions of feeds out there; I'm hardly paralyzed by that fact. This is much ado over nothing at all....
Previous Topic
