mercredi août 25, 2004

Perfect Blog Reader
The ideal blog reader or client RSS aggregator is probably somewhere in between bloglines.com and NetNews Wire (MacOS only) or Firefox's Sage.

I don't have a rich client blog reader. I use a combination of online service plus a browser plugin for notification purposes. So far this is what has worked best for me. But the main issue I faced is that a public web site like Bloglines.com doesn't work for non-publically accessible RSS feeds (and whe're starting to have quite a few Sun-internal feeds showing up here and there). This is fine for most people given blogs are usually public "speak to the world" kind of things. But RSS is much bigger than blogs and syndicated content will ultimately help bring down the number of emails we receive daily while maybe also increasing our productivity. I don't really want to compare RSS and email, I think they're quite different. I just wish I had less email!

The whole point of having a blog reader is to remember a reader's context (his subscriptions and what he's already read). This is quite hard to do with a rich client if you have more than one computer. I use at least 3 different computers: a laptop (both Windows and Linux), my Solaris SunRay and my Mac at home. My experience so far is that the perfect blog reader doesn't exist and never will (which is good for competition and innovation). But what we need is a standard for saving a user context - all RSS subscriptions for a given user and where he's already been. This should be stored on a secure public server and accessed from any client (rich or thin) or device.

Since I don't yet have a centralized online address book for email, it may be a while before this happens. Being still pretty new to this RSS/Blog ecology, this may be in the works or even already available. Maybe this all but an RTFM comment (I probably need to look at OPML.org and read more of P@'s blogs).
( août 25 2004, 12:41:46 PM CEST ) Permalink