Saturday, February 04, 2006

What's next? "Mashups" of feeds, forming virtual publications. That's another way of describing reading lists, the hot new idea for RSS in 2006. Readers can delegate the act of subscribing to experts in subjects they are interested in. 

Amyloo: "A slant on reading lists I've thought about are specialized lists that change their composition entirely on a periodic basis, a list in which none of the feeds you see today may be there next week." 

Hey if you're going to SXSW, I was going to roll something out there. I made the offer, they weren't interested. Who do you got to blow to get on their agenda?  

James Little: "Imagine going to a newsstand where every piece of news is separated by author or publication, then placed in envelopes which have descriptive labels attached. No one would read anything." 

NY Times: "America Online and Yahoo are about to start using a controversial system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely." 

TechCrunch on new competition for Memeorandum.  

Jon Udell on lock-in with Apple iTunes and RSS. They really are a piece of work. When we did our deal with the NY Times we could have easily locked everyone else out, but we didn't because we wanted the format to grow. Now Apple is cashing in our generosity. The tech industry is so desperate.  

A free idea for search engines 

This idea originally ran on 4/12/04. Still a good idea, still waiting for one of the search engine companies to do it.

A search engine views the Web as a set of pages. Before Google, they were unrelated pages, but Google started a practice where pages were considered more relevant to a topic if other pages linked to them using the topic as a key word. The more relevant the page doing the pointing, the more relevance it transfers to the pages it points to. It was and is a brilliant and very useful idea.

A picture named pingIBook.jpgAt roughly the same time we were developing weblogs, RSS and aggregators. They change the unit of the Web from a page to a post. And because RSS is becoming quite common, it means that search engines can become more relevant to users in a different way, by precisely finding the context of a pointer, and perhaps relating other pointers that are nearby. The RSS helps introduce certainty into the concept of "nearby."

I'm not an expert in search engines, but I've yet to see Yahoo, MSN or Google return a hit for a news item in a weblog or news site, so I assume they don't understand RSS. If they did, they might be able to provide a richer service to users.