For the last few months I have had a keyword search on Newsgator covering topics of interest here, things like cellular telephony and open source. (Last call to buy the book.)
I have watched as it has gradually become worse than useless.
I'm getting nearly 500 e-mails a day on this feed, but the signal-noise ratio keeps going up. Newsgator has begun designating some of these posts as spam, but they're missing most of them, including this one.
Even some of the "editorial" hits on this list are worse than useless. Here's one. No offense to the writer but it doesn't belong in a keyword feed for cellular, despite the fact that one of the entries in this list is "I have a mobile phone."
It gets worse, but maybe I have a solution.
One reason for this is that many blogs are themselves no more than collections of ads. See any editorial here? I didn't think so. The whole purpose of such blogs is to create RSS and hope someone clicks through by accident.
One of the unintended impacts of this is to increase our dependence on a few key sites. When Newsgator bought FeedDemon and started shipping their RSS Reader it came pre-loaded with a host of "old media" sites along with some of the "new media" giants -- Doc Searls, TechDirt, EnGadget. Nothing wrong with these sources, but if you don't work at it (and most don't) you're not going to go beyond them, making these sites increasingly valuable, raising the cost of entry into these beats.
The bottom line is that RSS, as a way to find neat new stuff, is broken. Completely. There are people trying to fix this using editorial judgement, and many people now depend on those judgements, but the safest thing for those judges to do is stay with what's in the Top 100, which only makes it harder for anyone else to break through.
What would really help, right now, would be a good blog that just points to great blogs found by the blog writer, on specific topics, organized and clear. Getting someone on the blogging beat is a short term solution, but right now it's all I can think of.
And if, say, the makers of an RSS reader would hire these people, there's a business model for it.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Jon Lowder on June 16, 2005 12:02 PM writes...
I'm glad you posted this. I have a feed on "competitive intelligence" set up to track stories in the field and I'd say that 95% are ad engines. I'll probably delete it in the next day or two.
Permalink to Comment2. Thuktun on June 24, 2005 11:03 PM writes...
Honestly, this shouldn't surprise anyone. This is the same way Usenet noise overwhelmed signal, requiring people to come up with things like NoCeMs and Cleenfeed. Perhaps some of the same methods could be used to filter RSS feeds.
Additionally, I think this may be where networks of trusted relationships comes into play. A feed filter could be developed that assigns a trust rating to a particular feed based on some combinatorial of trust ratings. Feeds below a certain threshold would be ignored.
Anytime we implicitly trust everything we receive, we set ourselves up to be misused. This goes for scripts in email, emails themselves, Usenet postings, RSS feeds, food, money, everything.
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