Brendon J. Wilson | Page 128 | www.brendonwilson.com

April 14, 2004April 16, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

Kill Your TV

Bruce Springsteen had it partly right when he wrote “57 channels (and nothin’ on)” – I say “partly” because he was off by an order of magnitude. As I flip through the barren wasteland that is the 500-channel cable television universe, I have to wonder: how is it possible that, despite a factor of ten increase in the number of channels, the amount of TV content fit for human consumption has actually decreased?

Every genre or popular show from the past twenty or thirty years now seems worthy of its own channel – but just how long, medically speaking, can a person watch reruns of old shows? Watching Gilligan get smacked by the Skipper is fun and all, but at some point, doesn’t it cause renal failure or brain damage? I mean who was the rocket scientist at TVland that gave birth to their motto (“Life’s too short to watch crap”)? Life’s too short? Absolutely! <click>!

It only gets worse. In an effort to maximize the investment in new content, networks have taken to rescheduling shows on the fly. The logic behind this, apparently, is to avoid attempting to compete against other special events or shows that might draw the majority of the audience. It would seem that network executives think we’re all part of the same mooing herd – like our attention span is too short to actually follow an entire season of a show. Sorry, but if the American public can’t follow a season of the West Wing, then there need to be comprehensive IQ testing before anyone is allowed to vote.

I predict this type of disregard for the creation of quality television on a fixed schedule will only hasten the demise of network television. Technology solutions like Tivo and other personal video recorders are only the first step – BitTorrent is fast becoming a powerful way for people to get the content they want, when they want it. Why bother subscribing to cable when you can download high-definition rips of the shows you want, sans commercials? On the west coast, this is especially attractive, as rips for shows are usually available before they broadcast, due to the three hour time difference. If anyone gets decent broadband (and no, decent broadband is not available in the US, as far as I’m concerned), the networks are screwed.

Even if the networks succeed in blocking these technologies, they’ve still got problems: books don’t have commercials, JK Rowling seems to have reminded kids and adults alike how to read, and the library is free. The next great step “forward” in entertainment might turn out to be a giant leap backwards.

April 12, 2004April 16, 2012 by Brendon J. Wilson

RSS Newswhore

I’m embarrassed to say I only bothered to install an RSS aggregator last week, after I became painfully aware that the bookmarks folder in my browser is the web equivalent of a roach motel: web sites check in, but they don’t ever get checked out. Using RSS to do the heavy lifting seemed like a good idea to keep me informed – hey, if even the Canadian government is hip to RSS, what have I got to lose?

I’ll tell you what: a giant pile of my spare time, that’s what.

It’s not that RSS itself is a bad idea – serving out content in an XML format that can be easily parsed and aggregated is a great idea. I, like any self-respecting, cutting-edge geek, want the newest information and I want it milliseconds after it’s been captured by sensor-studded bloggers on the scene to capture the moment. The problem with RSS is you start drowning in information, and most of that information is essentially identical.

Everyone starts assembling their list of RSS feeds by hitting the big sites first – Slashdot, Wired, CNet, Scripting News, Boing Boing, and anyone else that appears in the top ten of Technorati. And then the updates come streaming in…and in…and in…and in. Who would have thought that 6 billion people could generate so much information? Suddenly I’m dealing with the problem of cleaning out my RSS aggregator in a computer-age equivalent of beat the clock.

But it gets worse.

With RSS, every one of those sites you valued for aggregating news suddenly looks remarkably similar. For example, last week every one of these sites broadcast the latest story about Gmail, or a variant thereof – and there I was, drowning in a mass of RSS posts from different sites on exactly the same topic.

Whoopee, isn’t this magical.

Someone needs to take RSS aggregators/readers to the next level. What I’d like to see is an RSS reader that examines the links in various RSS feeds and assembles a hierarchy of feeds on a particular topic. So instead of seeing a zillion posts, I should see one – the root post to which all the other RSS posts point either directly or indirectly through other intermediate posts. Of course, this would require some work on the part of bloggers to identify the source of their information to enable readers to create such a hierarchy of related posts. For all I know, the solution already exists, but I haven’t heard about it because I ceased to surf the web sometime last week to delete posts in my RSS reader instead.

Grouping related topics in RSS would be one simple way to help people triage the deluge of new information available each and every day. If RSS readers grouped related items, I could delete a “tree” of RSS posts on a topic if I decided I didn’t care about the topic. On the other hand, if I did care to see the commentary, I could “zoom in” to the related RSS posts to view related information and commentary. That way, I could not only get all the latest information using RSS, but also actually find the right information from sites that aggregate news.

We need to start finding smarter ways to present information – all our efforts to enable intelligent access to information still feel really ham-fisted. Clever, but ham-fisted. We have more access to data than ever, but I fear our access to knowledge remains either unchanged or increasingly impaired. Though RSS gives you access to all the information you can eat, our stomach for information is finite. Nobody needs every piece of available information – they need the ability to spot the high points on the sea of information and navigate towards the shores of those information landmarks they actually care about. To do otherwise is to leave the user treading water.