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February 15, 2005
rss a go go
I'm trying to cut back on my web browser usage, trying to retrain myself to rely on the RSS news reader for most of my browsing. It's a tough road, as hard as all the times I've tried to learn touch typing, algebra or smoke left handed. I found that despite the feedreader I was still opening thirty or so browser tabs to create my "morning newspaper" as soon as I got online (using Firefox or Safari's "open bookmark folder n tabs feature"). It seems to a question of presentation, content and user experience.
Websites are chock full of layout goodness. They're modeled on newsletters, newspapers, flyers, handouts, slide presentations, magazines and books. Boomers and Gen Xers are used to this model, have grown up to it, have it ingrained in their systems. Gen Yers or late Xers who grew up online probably don't. RSS feed readers are more or less based on letters and the Unix terminal, they're stark and unadorned. Even the best of the newsreaders, like NetNewsWire beta, which allow for reformatting of the RSS feed through CSS, don't have the presentation quality of even a cheap newsletter. Which is the point of RSS, more news, less distraction. And yes, I've messed around with various style sheets and fonts to make it more readable for me.
Some sites with either in house content management systems or hand management have RSS feeds that make no sense, merging posts and articles, or ads. Sometimes they break a single post into multiple ones-or truncate them to uselessness. Some of them have posts repeated, or out of sequence.
Another problem I have is that some RSS feeds are summaries. Like the handamde RSS feeds, where content is lost through semantic stupidity, a post of links to new software that's summarized to just the first paragraph is a lose: so is one broken apart into 20 RSS entries. This is especially annoying when dealing with news sites such as Slashdot, which are themselves little more then news feeds to begin with. A (bad) summary of a summary is a waste of time, you end up having to click through to the original post, or just loading the entire site anyway. The summary feeds are also the hardest to parse and retain, lacking context and being so similar to each other. Having the BBC, Guardian and NYT feeds in your news reader is like listening to AM news stations all day: by noon, you're tired of the repetition and can't remember the news stories anyway.
Other sites like Engadget or Boing Boing loose signal in a news reader when the images are stripped out.
So i'm busy stripping feeds out of NNW beta, and building a cut down bookmark folder. The experiment will continue, along with the podcast playing while browsing. Maybe by this time next month I'll know which is better for me, which leads to higher retention, or if either style of news inhalation can match my retention of Newsweeks read in the bathroom thirty years ago.
Posted by parody at February 15, 2005 12:54 PM
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