Better living through RSS
Yahoo! Groups : berkman-thursday Messages : Message 108 of 109
RSS is'nt the greatest title, but this article is dead on, and we will see changes.
Yahoo! Groups : berkman-thursday Messages : Better Living through RSS
Subject: Better Living through RSS
Hi all,
I was trying to think of a way to express to other people what I saw
Dave demoing at last night's meeting, and I thought I'd share. I posted
this on my blog (the text there contains HTML links out to other stuff,
but I wanted to be sensitive to peoples' preference regarding plaintext
email in this context. You can see the post with links at:
http://www.cadence90.com/blogs/2003_11_01_nixon_archives.html#1069430655
85972685).
Speaking of Dave and Better Living through RSS, last night I attended
the Thursday night bloggers' meeting at the Berkman Center where Dave
demoed -- what should I call it? -- a new kind of architecture for a
blogging system, which would eventually enable users to view a blog not
just in its plain reverse-chron format but also hierarchically by topic,
and in a sort of wiki-like way, depending on the preferences of the
reader. Interestingly, each topic and subtopic also has its own unique
RSS feed, so you could subscribe, for example, to either "Baseball" or
"Baseball>Boston Red Sox" (although that's a bad example as I believe
Dave is a Mets fan). If you subscribed to "Baseball," you'd get the
underlying stuff about the Sox and any other teams that were lower on
the hierarchy. The hierarchy itself is separate from the actual data of
the posts, and if someone else liked your categorization scheme and
wanted to use it, they could if you wanted to publish an OPML file of
that hierarchy and put it in a public place.
In answering the question, "Why do it this way?" Dave gave an
interesting response -- the atomization of a blog into feeds would allow
users to merge the "my world" of their blog with content from the many
"their worlds" on the net. Such merged topical hierarchies could then
themselves be exported as an OPML file and a defacto statement of "this
is my point of view -- my information and other information from beyond
my domain that I think is important."
I really like the idea of giving new forms of representations to blog
data beyond simple reverse-chron or simple categories. I'd like to be
able to switch views of my blog from reverse-chron to "wiki-like" or
even a visual representation of the connections that I am building
between me and ideas and others' ideas. I'm thinking of it for myself,
but Dave makes a good point about why it is good for readers that are
new to a blog (I paraphrase here, so any errors are my own:
What would you do with a blog with 100 or 200 contributors on a subject
with tremendous data flow? How do you make that digestible to a reader
just coming into it in the middle?
Dave's idea is that supporting views other than reverse-chron gives new
participants entry points into the data rather than just throwing them
midstream into a conversation that has been going on for some time. As
an aside, Dave noted that he doesn't really like the idea of a "team
blog" with say 20 people contributing, and I infer from this that he
thinks that this is a sort of compromise because we don't have the
technology to allow readers to assemble "multiblogs" comprised of any
number of different voices on the fly. A point he made about this:
Think of it as building something for the next [event of September
11th's magnitude].
The idea being is that if enough people build and use in this direction,
you would have a better platform to see an event in real time as
thousands of people blog it, report on it, take photos of it -- and a
reader would be able to assemble this into a coherent mass for
themselves on the fly, and then save that hierarchy as a snapshot of the
state of that day, and allow that hierarchical "tree" to grow leaves and
change over time.
Oddly, what this all makes me think of is a remark by my old boss Harry
Tse on Chinese food (it's dinner time and I am pretty hungry. Maybe
that's why the food metaphors!). He noted that most Chinese food is
plated in such a way that knives aren't neccessary for the diner.
Western food, he said, involved a different division of labor between
the cook and the eater -- western cooks might put a steak on the plate,
but a Chinese cook would be more likely to slice the steak into
bite-size pieces easy to handle with chopsticks.
In a similar way, development of RSS is changing the division of labor
between the author of web content and the reader of web content. Right
now, the author is responsible for almost everything including the
visual layout of the page. In an RSS world, the reader has much more
control over how to display their information to themselves, slicing and
dicing incoming information from different sites, displaying it in ways
far beyond simple reverse-chron, and putting the visual "sauce" on it
that they like best.
Lisa W.
November 23, 2003 at 06:13 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink
| Top of page
| Blog Home
