Part of the reason for this has to do with the relatively non-intuitive way that RSS feeds are added to RSS readers for end users. And part of it is due to the rise of social media applications for information sharing (read: Twitter, Facebook) and the real time web.

So where does that leave things heading into 2010? The consensus of the blogosphere is, well, a muddled one.

ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus reported late last month that the RSS Reader market is in disarray but then dialed back and returned with 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock. Venture Chronicles bluntly states that "RSS as a standard has failed to evolve in ways that solve publisher problems." And Louis Gray (rightly) points out that "the current discussion around RSS being less useful, or less important, than in years past, is flawed, period."

With the web, one thing that we know is that things are forever changing, and usually more quickly as opposed to less. So it is with RSS as well, and one thing we know for sure is that the use of RSS will evolve based on patterns affecting the social web, the real time web, and so on.

Allen Stern's smart takeaway is that the era of full RSS feeds may be ending because online publishers can now effectively promote themselves without "giving away" full content via RSS. Personally, as a heavy Google Reader user, this would not bother me all that much as I often click through to the stories that I take the time to read end-to-end.

Meanwhile, I still see huge potential and opportunity of Google Reader as a content sharing and social media tool. At its best, the shared and shared + note features offer the an ideal combination of "smart social network" and "smart content aggregator." And no doubt Mother Google will have more in store for us this year.

Finally, it just occurred to me: if Google had acquired FriendFeed rather than Facebook, would the RSS landscape look significantly different today?

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

I also like to use Google Readers “shared + note” feature as a quick and easy way to drop a short comment on stories I like while I’m sharing the story with my Google contacts. However, just today I realized that I’m doing myself and my fellow bloggers a disservice in the sense that I don’t leave comments on the “source” blog post page nearly as much as I used to.

I also realized that (the newly redesigned!) Online Media Cultist doesn’t get nearly as many comments as it used to. Part of this is my fault as I go through lengthy periods where I’m not posting a ton, and part of it has to do with the fact that comments get distributed on places like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.

The “distributed conversation” thing is where the Internet and blogosphere is going, and I’m fine with that. People want to have conversations where they’re hanging out, which in fact is why I’ve become so accustomed to leaving comments via Google Reader!

But, as they say, I can control my own actions. And that leads to my new year’s resolution #1 for 2010: comment more.

I resolve to comment on the source blog page of five blogs each day, every weekday.

It’s part of my social media goodwill plan for the new year. Pay it forward, y’all.

Increasingly, social media web sites are becoming much more than places to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues online. They’re becoming major hubs of information consumption, analysis and distribution as well, so it’s important to understand how this trend is playing out on some of the more popular destinations on the social web.

In fact, social media web sites such as Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook have the potential to take over many of the functions of RSS readers such as Google Reader, Newsgator and Bloglines.

Twitter
Amidst all the hubbub of Ashton Kutcher and CNN and Oprah Winfrey and Save Chuck, Twitter has become a nifty and dynamic way to receive inbound alerts about news stories and information, giving the ability to turn your Twitter stream into an “RSS reader” of sorts.

There are a few different ways to use Twitter as an RSS reader. The first is to simply follow those users who broadcast links to stories and web sites that you find interesting and relevant (Robert Scoble, for example, when it comes to all things tech, Internet and geek). This is a means of crafting your own “smart people network” that sends the best stories and links to you. As David Drager at systemBash writes, “I find it awesome to be able to see what is going on, without having to manage ‘feeds.’”

(read the the rest of this piece at Web Worker Daily) ]]> http://onlinemediacultist.com/2009/05/05/using-social-media-sites-as-rss-readers/feed/ 0 http://onlinemediacultist.com/2009/02/27/should-rss-be-jettisoned-on-the-information-journey/ http://onlinemediacultist.com/2009/02/27/should-rss-be-jettisoned-on-the-information-journey/#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:59:25 +0000 Eric Berlin http://onlinemediacultist.com/?p=542 A Stay N’ Alive piece (is there a cooler blog name than that?) by Jesse Stay called My Hiatus From RSS – Is RSS Really Necessary? made me think about my own ongoing challenge/struggle/scramble to grapple with the massive number of news stories, blog posts, comments, tweets, and on and on that might potentially be of use, interest, or service to my own work on any given day.

In other words: with so much stuff going on every second of every day, how can we best make sense of it all, and efficiently if possible?

Jesse, taking heed of advice given to him by Forrester Senior Analyst and blogger Jeremiah Owyang, is experimenting with a plan that I toyed with some months back: abandon the RSS reader completely. Now, Google Reader is such an important part of my information-devouring day that it seems somewhat radical to give it the heave ho. But it also takes a lot of time to get down to zero new items. And I must admit that at times I wonder: is it worth it?

Not so much from an existential standpoint, but from an efficiency standpoint, it’s always worth examining what the best way to get the most out of culting out on online media. So here’s a quick breakdown of different ways, different paths, and different strategies of absorbing information on the wild web.

(read the rest of this piece at louisgray.com)

Here’s how it would work.

I’ve written before about how much I love Google Reader’s “shared + note” feature. It’s a fun and somewhat addictive way to jot little notes, thoughts, and opinions about stories that you’re sharing while browsing through your RSS feeds via Google Reader.

Now, things get really cool when you factor in reading the jotted notes/thoughts/opinions that your friends are sharing as well. It’s a quick and efficient way to read stories that your contacts have vetted as worthy of attention along with jotted notes besides, a modern day version of newspaper clippings that made their way around offices with sticky notes attached.

Just today I was reading a story that was shared by my friend Jason Kaneshiro and read his shared + note along with it. And this is where I got to thinking… I wanted to respond to Jason’s shared + note with my own shared + note.

Of course I can do this now in a sense, but there are a few barriers to perfecting this next step. The first way I can do it is to simply add my shared + note, attribute Jason’s comment, and share my own thought. This is a bit clunky, however, in that people reading my shared items won’t get a full sense of what Jason was saying, and the onus is on me to convey Jason’s thoughts properly, which in theory can take some time, effort, and expertise.

The second way is slightly better, more time consuming, and begins to bring FriendFeed into the picture. I can track down Jason’s FriendFeed profile page on FriendFeed, search or browse my way to the very same shared story, and add my comment to the thread that he began there. The problem here, of course, is that I’m adding my thoughts on the FriendFeed “side” and have therefore neglected the shared + note option in Google Reader that I was so excited about in the first place.

All of that said, I think it’s pretty extraordinary that sharing and shared + note already have an existing FriendFeed tie-in. That is, if you add your Google Reader RSS feed to your FriendFeed profile, all of your shared and shared + note stories show up on your FriendFeed “life stream.”

So to get back to my original thought, what I would think to be a natural next step is to allow shared + note comments to tie together on both Google Reader and FriendFeed.

So in other words, I can reply to Jason’s comment on a shared story using shared + note, and both of those comments would “automagically” show up on both of our shared items within Google Reader, and both of our life streams on FriendFeed.

One final cherry on top: give people the option to turn this feature off it annoys them.

It wouldn’t be annoying to me though – I’d make it a significant part of my social media interaction.

This is just an initial blast of thinking about what I think could be a great new feature. What say all of y’all?

For a long time I didn’t pay much attention to either “shared” or “shared with note.” But over the past six months or so, I’ve become increasingly addicted to the “shared” feature. Not only is it addictive in a digg/reddit “vote it up” kind of way, but it’s a rather nice way to collect the stories that you like.

I love browsing through the stories that my Gmail contacts have shared, and even better, my shared items also appear on my FriendFeed stream, so that other people can “like” it and comment and so on.

I’ve been a fan of Robert Scoble’s shared items for some time, actually added it as a standalone RSS feed some time ago before entering my new shared-crazed fame. Over time I noticed that little notes were being inserted into the top of the shared items, as so:

Pretty cool, I thought. But it wasn’t until very recently that I put it all together (sometimes I’m a little slow on these things, perhaps!) that adding a note to a shared item actually tacks that note directly onto your FriendFeed thread.

So in essence you’re kicking off a potential conversational thread about an interesting story right from your “HQ” of digging through stories on Google Reader.

That’s pretty easy, intuitive (once it gets on your radar), social media-y, microbloggy, addictive. In short, rad.

I was wrong.

I’m using Google Reader more than ever, and love its social features as much as the ability to wolf down monstrous amounts of information in a relatively short amount of time. If I had to complain about something (and why not, this is my blog and I can whine if I want to, right?), it’s that right now, this very moment, the pointer finger and middle finger are sore from working the scroll wheel on my mouse!

As the story goes, I just finished a pretty good session of tearing through hundreds of feeds and noticed that the tips of my scroll wheel fingers were burning up, Sahara-meets-sun like. It was then that I “discovered” a miraculous feature: the ability to switch over from an Expanded View to a List View on Google Reader. Now, I’ve known about this feature for a while, but have kind of neglected it. I do enjoy scrolling through stories and seeing associated images and a quick glance at the content and so forth, but a long list of feeds as I’ve noted can take it’s toll.

What I didn’t realize until today is that List View can be an extraordinary way to scan ever vaster mounds of articles at once while easily letting you “drill into” article titles that interest you straight away.

And as an aside: this reemphasizes the importance of article titles from the website publisher perspective. Ironic titles and non sequiturs are great and all… but don’t tend to work all that well in the competitive (for eyeball attention) and literal world of the Interwebs.

And in conclusion: does this conclude another adventure from Captain Obvious, is this a handy-nifty tip-oid that might help others, or in fact have I stepped one small yet significant step toward discovering the true nature of The Matrix?

I’ll let y’all decide.