Entries Tagged 'Feeds' ↓

One of my favourite things since intalling Tiger has been the new version of Apple’s web browser, Safari RSS. The RSS stuff is fine, though I’m sticking with NetNewsWire, but what I really like is the speed and integration of Safari, and the fact that you can finally import bookmarks from other browsers. For now, I’ve switched from Firefox, though it’s a close competition between the two.

Wish list for Safari: I would love it if in-page searching was accessed through a search bar integrated into the main browser window, as Firefox does it currently.

that building a marketing site without including RSS feeds should be a firing offense, and today he updated his post with links to comments from a couple of Jupiter analysts: Eric Peterson and Michael Gartenberg.

I mostly agree with Scoble, but I think he’s expressing it backwards. The point isn’t to have RSS, period, the point is to quit building boring, static sites - sites that frankly aren’t a good fit for RSS. After all, a static site with RSS but no updates doesn’t really make a blip in any newsreader until it updates. Static site = nothing new to come down the RSS pipe = site that few will notice or care about.

So rather than insisting that sites need RSS, I think it’s more useful to suggest that marketing sites should include at least a small dynamic, regularly updating component and hopefully quite a bit more. In that context, to leave out an RSS feed is ridiculous. But it’s not about the feed, primarily, but about the content on the site in the first place.

[Note: I posted virtually the same thing already in the comments at Dave Winer’s RSS site]

I’ve been following all the hoo-haw about RSS and Atom and such for a long time now. I have used NetNewsWire at home and Bloglines (here’s my list there: mikel’s blogs). I love that more and more services are offering syndicated content in whatever format. But I also know this: I hate reading weblogs through their feeds.

For me, the words on a website aren’t really distinct from the overall effort that has been put into the site - the design, the additional content, the links, the stupid little buttons - I love all of that stuff. Extracting the words from that is, to me, to denude the weblog owner’s work far too much, it is to remove more context than I like. I have found that I much prefer a service like Blo.gs or something that lets me know when my favourite sites have been updated so I can go and read them myself, and in the format that the writer intended.

I don’t mind if you, dear reader, prefers to read this in either RSS or Atom formats (I provide both). But me? I prefer to get the full effort a person has made, not the minimalist version that RSS provides.