Ted Leung on the air
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Sat, 09 Aug 2003
Give me the whole thing
Ziv wrote about types of weblogs, and Sam followed up about two types of aggregators. Andrew Grumet weighed in on aggregators that scale.

I'm interested in timeboxing my RSS reading. The more items I can read per unit time, the better. Having to click, or spacebar or whatver slows me down. Out of the many items a day that I read, only a few are worth following up on (either via blogging it, or going to see the comments or whatever). When a feed doesn't include all the content, then it slows me down if I have to click and have the tab open up in Mozilla. (FeedDemon can do this now). It's especially bad if I have to do that, only to find that the item wasn't of interest to me. So I want all the content in the feed.

I live on an island. I use buses and ferries for transportation. I wait a lot. It's the perfect time to catch up on stuff that's piled up in the aggregator. If you don't give me the whole content, I can't read your feed when I'm waiting in line for the boat, or commuting on the boat. Ray Ozzie is right. We need disconnected functionality. But we not only need disconnected functionality, we need the data so that we can work disconnected. So I want all the content in the feed.

I don't blog nearly everything that I read, but I do remember that I read about something. FeedDemon doesn't have a capability to search the feeds that it keeps on disk (it also limits how many items it will keep). I want to be able to search the stuff that I read (or saw go by). In order to do that I need the content on my disk to do the search. I know about Feedster. Every time I've tried to use feedster to do this, it either took to long for me to find it, or I didn't find it at all. So I want all the content in the feed.

I want to break down the walls between silos of personal information (including microcontent). In order to do that, I need my programs to be able to much on that data. If the data is off on your web page, it's harder to do. So I want all the content in the feed...

[23:12] | [computers/internet/microcontent] | # | TB | F | G | 6 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post
Ted Leung tells us how he uses an aggregator, and how the ones he uses fall short:

I don't blog nearly everything that I read, but I do remember that I read about something. FeedDemon doesn't have a capability to search the feeds that it keeps on disk (it also limits how many items it will keep). I want to be able to search the stuff that I read (or saw go by). In order to do that I need the content on my disk to do the search. I know about Feedster. Every time I've tried to use feedster to do this, it either took to long for me to find it, or I didn't find it at all. So I want all the content in the feed.

BottomFeeder has a lot of that functionality, but not really all combined the way Ted wants. For instance, Bf can search its internal store, and save as much as you want it to (you can now mark individual items as permanent). Bf can be set to auto-follow feeds that are links only, but:

  • It can't be set to follow excerpts only (good question - how would a tool know that we have an excerpt only?)
  • Even when it does auto-follow a link, the fetched data is not stored - it's transient

It looks like some of Ted's issues could be fixed on the aggregator side, but the full content desire really has to be met by the provider. Either way though, he provides some good food for thought


Posted by Trackback from Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants at Sun Aug 10 08:14:59 2003



Dare I say it?  NewsGator. :-)
Posted by Greg Reinacker at Tue Aug 12 13:37:12 2003

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I work at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).
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