Name The Elephant
As I’ve mentioned before, blogs and RSS are eating up a lot of my time. Scanning some 200-400 posts a day is grueling, but it’s a requirement of the breakneck speed at which the space is developing. Unfortunately, the explosive growth of the blogosphere is proving difficult to tame from a user’s perspective.
I would attribute part of the problem to the cyclic nature of the blogosphere. First, someone posts an interesting story – if you’re particularly unlucky, you’ll be subscribed directly to that blog and see the story the first time. Then a bunch more people will link to it – and again, if you’re subscribed to those blogs, you’ll see the story for a second time. At this point, the story will start to bubble up through the ecosystem of aggregator sites until it shows up on the radar of sites like Popdex, Blogdex, and Technorati. And then the mainstream media gets a hold of the story, and we go for another twirl on the information overload merry-go-round.
To extend my earlier thoughts on the need for a better user interface for RSS aggregators: an aggregator should not only have the ability to group related posts, but should have memory. By “memory” I mean that if I delete a group of posts on a particular topic, I should be able to make them go away. Forever. Now, some of this may be me wishing for a computer to read my mind, determine what I’d like to read about, and spit it out to me (I seem to recall something like this in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Cradle). The idea would be that if I no longer care about the most untranslatable word, or how required registration is a dumb idea, then I don’t have to keep seeing posts related to those stories in my aggregator.
Part of the solution to this problem requires RSS (or Atom) to incorporate a mechanism to tell the aggregator about the “root” story URL. But what is the true “root” story – heck, even smart guys like Joi have to pause to consider who to credit as the source for a post. What chance does a piece of software have?
Nevertheless, it would appear that unless we start thinking about how to address this phenomenon, because it’s only going to get worse. So, step one: name the enemy. What do we call the problem of stories endlessly ricocheting around the blogosphere? The Blog Bounce? The Blog Echo? Hmm. Not snappy enough. Any thoughts out there?
One reason I read Salon on a daily basis is that they have a sidebar with an unedited Associated Press feed. The same effect you mention – story replication – happens a lot even in a professional syndicated news feed. If something big happens in Iraq, AP reports it three or four times, often with the exact same information, probably just typed up by different string reporters.
So I guess one of the services provided by the traditional media delivery systems is filtering out the repeats. I love the blogosphere because it allows me to be my own news editor; I decide what I want to read and what I find interesting, instead of getting it prechewed for me. Unfortunately I guess that means I have to do the grunt work of filtering out story repeats too.
For now, that is. Nothing says technology can’t make it better…