Don’t Kill Your RSS Reader! Add To It

Farhad Manjoo wrote an interesting blog post on Slate Magazine on Friday (thanks to @johnmjones on Twitter for pointing it out). In it he describes a classic case of Blog Overload. He describes his joy at discovering RSS and Feed Readers. And his frustration at the eventual overload from too many feeds that he can’t keep up with. Then he describes his radical solution: quit his RSS reader and go back to manually checking for updates on a regular schedule in his web browser.

Nooooooooooooo!

So close yet so far. Farhad is in pain. That I understand. But to try and solve the pain all he could do as to cut off the use of his only tool. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Then the conversation erupted. Other folks started to chime in.

On Slate’s forums, the usual suggestions were made for things like filters by people like Horatio Nelson. Over at Mashable, Ben Parr joined in to ask the musical question “Do You Use an RSS Reader?” And his informal poll currently has 72% of his readers who use one “all the time”. Just after that, Steven Cahill wrote a blog post proclaiming that “RSS is Not Dead“. His conclusion, “Give me RSS any day.”

Once again I see the same need to combat Blog RSS Overload. And, I see the same frustrations and proposals. When people ask why we created Bscopes, this is exactly what drove us.

But, I don’t want to just go on and on summarizing this problem. I want to try and point out to Farhad, Ben, Steven and all the others suffering out there that we think we can help. Not to replace your trusty RSS feed reader, but to supplement it.

In Farhad’s original Slate Magazine post, there was this plea:

Moreover, I hated the software’s bland interface; when you read blogs through RSS, you’re only getting text, not design, so every blog looks like every other blog. But I didn’t want Gawker to look like the New Republic; I needed a visual difference, in the same way that I want the National Enquirer to look distinct from the New York Times.

That is the essence of the Bscopes approach. A picture, not more text. A visualization, not simply filtering.

For example, here is a Bspace (a picture of multiple blogs) that I added based on Farhad’s initial post.

Rather than get overloaded and then just hit “mark all read”, try picturing a slice of the blogosphere using Bscopes. Check out one blog. Or a group of blogs related by a tag. Or even a Bspace of all the blogs you read.

Use Bscopes to give you an overview of what is happening. You can check out the relationships at any given minute betweeen blogs. Or, over time, look for changing weather patterns in the blogosphere (a la Christophe).

But the key thing is to not give up. Don’t kill your feed reader. After all, a mime (type=”application/rss+xml”) is a terrible thing to waste.

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