RSS Rules!

February 4, 2003

The Shifted Librarian: The "Me" in Media

but the Corante crew just doesn't want to give up the RSS feeds, so I don't read a single Corante blog. Which is a real shame, because I hear they're quite interesting....

As I've pulled more feeds into NetNewsWire, it's become more and more useful and essential to my daily information diet. What I find also happening is that frequently updated web sites without feeds are becoming increasingly irrelevant and invisible. Opening NetNewsWire and scanning new headlines is simply a more elegant way of handling daily browsing than sequentially visiting a gaggle of sites. Sites that I might otherwise read daily, like Copyfight, get passed over in favor of the more easily accessible.

I am thrilled that two of my favorite bloggers are moving off Blogspot this week. Adam Felber has a spiffy new home with Movable Type, and Jeff Cooper plans to move. In terms of aggregation, Blogspot is largely a black hole. Few people who publish using Blogger have feeds, since the system does not automatically generate those feeds. Since most users of Blogspot are untechnical, Blogspot should automatically generate RSS feeds. Already, LiveJournal provides feeds for all its users (add rss/ to a livejournal user's URL.) Even better, Blogspot should provide feeds with the full entry in the feed by default. They could even put their ads in as an item. Posted by Andrew Raff at February 4, 2003 05:10 PM