Leap of Logic raises some good points about TailRank and the problem of feed readers in general.
A conversation between Wilson, Joshua Schacter and Brad Feld brought up the question of saturation point for blog subscriptions. There may be more of a continuum than a single saturation point. As Wilson noted, the more subscriptions added, the less attention available. The reader is less engaged with each additional blog decreasing his ability to converse with any one blogger on any one topic. Bill Burnham recommends some strategies to manage subscription overload. While these tips may help to manage the number of subscriptions, it’s not clear whether or not they’d enable the suscriber to re-engage those remaining interesting conversations
Feed readers aren’t going away anytime soon. I just don’t think the current applications will scale to 5k feeds. A lot of people in the aggregator space have talked about this for a while now but I think the thing we all have wrong is that feed readers can’t solve the problem.
Feed readers are personal. You have to see every post because most of the conversations are shallow.
If you want to read 5k feeds you have to remove all the detail and only show the interesting content.
Is this a new application? A meme reader? I think it’s certainly possible we’re seeing a new space emerge.
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November 2, 2005 at 5:29 pm
Personal Meme Readers may be useful in prioritising what I read first but I’ll still need my detail and I already prioritise my feeds by folders.
I’m starting to take the view that I may be better off not ever deleting feeds I subscribe to at one time or another too, instead bump em down as my interests change.
A meme reader would certainly be useful in picking the cream of the crop of those feeds I bump down or as a quick over view of all my feeds.
The ability for individuals to publish their own memes would be useful too.
meme-sharing. :)
I could then subscribe to someone else’s meme’s. That’d be awesome. It’d be interesting seeing all the meme experts popup.
November 2, 2005 at 5:46 pm
I wasn’t saying that feed readers would vanish btw… Just thhat there’s a new space opening up. I think they’ll augment feed readers for a lot of people.
November 2, 2005 at 9:36 pm
I’ve generally been heading in the direction of collecting an increasing number of feeds, but looking for better ways to filter and prioritize them. I’m well beyond swamped at this point (>500 feeds), and don’t even think about trying to read all of them these days.
I think the “meme engine” or “meme finder” approach works for topics of broad interest, due to the echo chamber effect of blogs posting pointers to each other on a hot topic.
I think some kind of relative authority metric needs to be applied in a different way to catch the low volume, low pagerank content of interest though.
Someone commented in the past couple of days about Memeorandum getting swamped with Microsoft postings, and also having virtually no women posters cited. Unless Gabe goes out of his way to seed the system with differently linking blogs, it will continue to do a great job of picking off the headline discussions, and be less useful for getting at other topics that are going on at lower volumes or in different circles.
This gets further complicated if you start crossing cultural and social groups thatl have different terminology. I’m following a number of English-language blogs from China, India, Korea, and other parts of Asia in which I can see recurring discussion but not necessarily the sort of repeating phrases that make the current “meme reader” filters bubble them to the top. Human tagging of the feeds and specific posts could help, but is relatively noisy input. Collaborative filtering and tagging could help generate a better view of “what’s interesting”.
I’ve been substantially offline for the past several days, and it’s been a bit liberating to find how much of the backlog I’m happy to just “mark as read”. There is so much echo and not so much original posted material.
Time to resort the feed list.