phil ringnalda

Part of the weblogging process to me is visiting each person’s unique site. The words and the surroundings form a unified whole that communicates more than just the words themselves. I like being notified when a person’s weblog is changed, and check weblogs.com regularly. But to strip a person’s thoughts and plunk it into a queue that gets spit out to me on this plain white background — this isn’t a true group forming and communication process, is it? — Burningbird

That’s exactly why I don’t have an RSS feed. Depending on who you ask, RSS stands for lots of things, but I favor Rich Site Summary, accent on the last word. It was designed by Netscape to put teasers into a portal, and it’s a good system for that, but now Radio is encouraging using it as a way to read weblogs without actually visiting them, and I don’t think that’s a good use of RSS. Not only does design matter (yeah, you wouldn’t know it by my design, would you?), but so do the things around your posts. Even within the sameness of Radio weblogs, there are still links to stories, and links to other sites. There are also comments: at first, I didn’t understand why anyone would suggest to Jonathon that he turn off his comments. “I very nearly missed this entire conversation hidden in the comment system.”? How hard is it to see “comments (10)” and click the link? Finally the other shoe dropped, and I realized that he must have been reading Jonathon’s RSS feed, not visiting his site, something that Radio makes far too easy. Perhaps the Radio model of responding to people’s posts by posting in your own weblog, then reading five other people’s response to your post on their weblogs, then replying to three on your weblog (bah!) would work if every single weblog was available in RSS, if everyone wanted to talk about your subject on their weblog (you won’t be getting NJ Meryl to respond to your metablog topics that way), and if you didn’t give a rat’s ass about the thoughts of anyone outside your circle.

RSS feeds of weblogs might actually be useful if they were feeds of just the post titles, linked to the post, and if you could persuade people to use meaningful titles. Coincidentally, somewhere today I saw a link to Cory Doctorow on the likelihood of people providing you with useful metadata: Metacrap.