A while back I asked people to make a list of sites they visit everyday. I was finding that there was an increasingly long list of places I visited daily and I was curious if others behaved similarly. What I found ended up changing much of my thinking …

Om Malik at GigaOm linked to a great post on Danah Boyd’s blog Apophenia about Melora Zaner’s research (my friend’s sister’s hairdresser’s…ok) on why IM reigns supreme in youth culture and why RSS feeds and aggregators may not be as…

apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture…

Here

This is fascinating and a must-read for online political communicatrons (yeah, i don’t know what else to call us either…). Anyway, we have been having some of these conversations around the office, and i definitely intend to check into more…

During a recent conversation with Microsoft Servers and Tools uberhoncho Eric Rudder I argued that web service interfaces are being increasingly standardized in interesting and useful ways (stating the bleedin’ obvious in other words!), pointing to Joh…

youth culture vs. rss-feeds and new LJ/Xangy-insta nt-messaging….

Over at Apophenia, Danah Boyd suggests that RSS feeds, like email, are primarily being used by the older generation: she says it’s Instant Messaging and SMS that’s got the attention of ‘youth,’ and the main type of feed they’re interested in is their L…

I don’t care about the news and I have very few text “blogs” I read, which I visit once every day, because many of them offer something more than just text. It makes no sense to me to “subscribe” to 5 or 20 different feeds that a single site offers, when I can just visit the site and experience everything. My reason for going back to many of the sites is just as much for the design of the site as it is for the content it provides. Do I *need* to be up to the minute on Bob’s feelings on the war or Mary’s trip to the bank? Not unless these entries fall off the main page the next day, so RSS serves no purpose to me.

On the other hand, the 40+ photologs I view only once a week and when they do provide feeds, they are worthless. The primary focus of the website, the photograph, is impossible to convey in the feed. Why only once a week? Only a small handful of the sites I view update more than once a week. When I go through them all, I just alternate loading one page in the background while I read another. Again, RSS serves no purpose to me.

In all the time since I first heard of RSS, only once have I ever seen a website that used an RSS feed for syndication purposes (i.e. displaying other site’s headlines as a sidebar to their own content). Once, I attempted to syndicate a local news site’s primitive pre-RSS XML feed for a local business’ website. And as much as I might enjoy them, I see no purpose to syndicate Bob or Mary’s day to day doings. So much for the power of syndication.

apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture…