Paolo Valdemarin Weblog

myYahoo does RSS, subscribing to feeds

It's probably old news, but I have just found out via Lockergnome RSS Resource that myYahoo now supports RSS. Cool, it looks like RSS is going mainstream.

Now... I think that we urgently need to find a better way to subscribe to RSS feeds. Copying and pasting links just doesn't work for a large majority of users: most of them are already confused because the click on the orange XML icon and get gibberish code in their browser. I don't know what the solution could be, it cannot be adding and endless series of icons for each different aggregator.

1:02:00 PM

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Intranet aggregators

I spent most of the week visiting small and large companies. The more I talk with "real people working in real companies" (meaning: not nerds spending their whole days hacking), the more convinced I am that a news aggregator is the ideal center for any Intranet.

The basic idea is merge to the same server contents coming from:

internal sources (accounting, trouble ticketing, exiting document management applications, other data bases: we should be able to get a feed from any internal app)
k-logs (every member of the group has one)
external news sources (general news, weblogs, specialized sources, scraped pages)

The output of the aggregator should be both html that people can browser with their browser and more feeds which could end up in personal aggregators or funneled in other applications.

Centralized aggregators should not necessarily mean that every user has to read all feeds. There should be both the kind of personalization allowed by personal aggregators (deciding which feeds to subscribe to) but also added vaue services that would allow users to discover additional sources of information and anyway give different relevance to different kind of information snippets that are displayed on the page.

11:09:09 AM

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Venerdì, 5 settembre 2003