Paolo’s Weblog

I love tags and feeds.

For the last 15 years almost every technology project I have been involved with was somehow related to tags and feeds (I started with feeds in 1998, then added tags sometime in 2001).

The fact is that a feed aggregator is an incredibly powerful concept, and that using tags to organize and create views in aggregated contents is a great way of managing information. There are many tools you can use to create feeds. There are not that many that allow you to manage feeds, that’s why I find aggregators interesting, especially when used to power a content management system.

I’m now working on my 3rd aggregator, hoping to avoid the mistakes of the past and trying to make brand new mistakes which will teach us something. It looks like it’s the right time: with GReader closing down people are talking about feeds again, and tags seem to be back on the map too (with still a few pretty big issues to solve).

And there might even be a little conference on RSS!

I love tags and feeds.

Too many years ago to count, the company I worked with developed a Radio UserLand plug-in to scrape web sites and generate RSS feed. One of the first filters that we developed was the one for Dilbert.com, which back then was not offering RSS feeds yet.

Some time later they started publishing the official feed, and I have been a happy subscriber ever since. Until last week, when they broke it. Instead of my daily strip, now every day this is what I get in my aggregator:

Dilbert readers – Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

Now, I’m not a “full content in your feed” fundamentalist, but if all your content is a comics strip, you can’t get away just linking it.

My guess is that this is another effect of Google Reader closing: the number of feed subscribers must have dropped significantly, and they decided that whoever was left was not relevant enough. They must have thought: “At least let’s get their lazy eyeballs back on our site so they can be exposed to our fantastic banners and we increase our page views”

It looks like it’s time to go back to scrapers.

PS: I’m sure that this move also broke hundreds of intranet home pages that were adding some color to otherwise boring sites using that feed.