Structure in the flow

Just a quick post to underline a Google Reader feature which, though simple, may come in handy: creating a feed for “feed-less” sites. It basically tracks updates on pages by periodically checking the pages you choose.

I need to mention that for table-based pages (or any page with recurring pattern but no feed) there are existing services such as Dapper which will allow you to create a more sophisticated and precise feed by creating a page scrapper on-the-fly.

It’s the kind of feature for which I tend to find more and more uses as time goes on. One significant example I’m thinking of is personal homepages of friends and people who haven’t yet integrated a feed: it’d be nice to be alerted when they change.

Update the next day: there seems to be plenty other similar services. ChangeDetection.com is an old one, sending updates via email. For others, just Google for “monitor page changes”.

(To be perfectly honest, from a programmer’s point of view, I guess you could do the same by having a list of URLs and setting up a script to periodically check whether significant changes have been made (i.e. using a “diff”). Yet I never took the time to do it, and now that’s it’s easily available…)

(Via this LifeHacker article)

In my introductory article on RSS, I mentioned that fundamental to a good information diet is following the right sources. Here’s an article on ReadWriteWeb that shows you a method on how to do just that: find the top blogs for a given topic (niche). It compares different ranking systems for blogs.

Once you’ve read that, you might want to check out this other article, which builds on the first one and shows you how to find the most relevant knowledge the set of results you’ve come up with. In essence, it uses AideRSS’ PostRank to find the best articles in the list of blogs you’ve come up with, and shows you how to use Google Custom Search to build a custom search engine that searches only those top sites you’ve found.

This is about a year old, but very relevant here. Timothy Ferriss, author of “The 4-hour workweek”, interviewed Robert Scoble and filmed his RSS reading process (he’s suscribed to more than 600 feeds!).

In the end, perhaps unsurprisingly, the magic relies on being really quick at judging an article from its title, its overall look and other cues. There are a couple of technical tips, though, about using the Google Reader interface efficiently, like relying on keyboard shortcuts.

Here’s the video:

In my last post, I introduced RSS feeds, and concluded saying you need to choose your feeds wisely or they might feel overwhelming. Here, I’ll present the concept of social bookmarking, by which groups of people collaborate in voting for the best sites they find on the Web.

Social bookmarking

Bookmarking, as you know, is saving favorite Web pages for later reference. Social bookmarking is about sharing bookmarks, to make the most popular content emerge.

Social bookmarking sites are therefore tools for surfers to aggregate their bookmarks in a public, organized space. Some of the most popular tools are Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and StumbleUpon. They all have the concept of “front page” or “top list”, which are the most popular links at the moment. This is what you need to keep an eye on.

The good thing is all those top lists have an RSS feed, and you can therefore track many of these lists from your RSS aggregator. They usually have RSS feeds for subtopics (tags), say “programming”, so you can be more precise on what type of links you want to get.

Communities

There are dozens more social bookmarking sites (Google for “social bookmarking sites”), often specializing in a particular topic, and each having its own community. Notably, some focus on the “news” items (ex: Newsvine), while others are more general (ex: del.icio.us).

The site community has strong influence on the quality and type of links and comments found on those sites. For example, MetaFilter is a site renowned for its focus on quality discussions, and charges a small fee for signup to encourage in that sense.

If you feel like it, you might join a site’s community and start sharing your own bookmarks, vote on those you like, and comment on them, therefore contributing to these communities and helping in the filtering process. By the way, blogs and sites often have a “submit on Reddit” button (or similar for Digg etc.) so if you liked the content you may help in promoting it, thereby encouraging the author.

You don’t need to share all your bookmarks, of course: you may still use the old fashioned browser bookmarks for those you deem private, and publish only links you choose.

Other sharing options

If you own a Web site, say a blog, it’s easy to display the RSS feed of your latest bookmarks to share them with your visitors.

You can also share them on social networks, say on Facebook, where it is possible to have links regularly updated on your profile from your del.icio.us feed, for example. Facebook in particular also has its own “share on Facebook” functionality integrated, so is also a social bookmarking site in its own right, albeit with more control on privacy.

References

• Wikipedia: Social bookmarking

This post is for those who don’t know about RSS and syndication. Read on: this is easy and can save you a lot of time when reading your daily news and blogs.

Symbol for an RSS feed

The gist

An RSS feed (RSS: Real Simple Syndication) is a frequently updated list of… items. Usually the items are the latest news or blog posts of a site. You access a feed through its Web address, say http://www.fsavard.com/flow/feed/. Most big news sites (Google News, New York Times, etc.) publish such feeds, as do most blogs.

Concretely, what you do, personally, is build a list of RSS feeds (Web addresses), say of your favorite blogs and news sites. Then, having saved them in a tool called an RSS reader, every time you want to see what’s new on those sites, you refresh (re-download) the feeds, allowing you to get all updates in the same place. This saves you time and effort, and allows you to see everything in a linear, organized manner. Compare that with having to visit every site, only to see that most of them were not updated anyway.

Screenshot of FeedDemon, a popular RSS reader

It’s important to realize that an RSS feed may represent just about anything. Some people, for example, publish their new bookmarks using that, or their recent activities on the Web. So if your friends publish such feeds, you can get news from them in the same place you read your daily news. One site built on such a concept is FriendFeed.

The tools

There are many tools to “aggregate” RSS feeds, called RSS readers (or aggregator). They all basically follow the same principle: you add feeds (URLs) and classify them in categories (world news, science news, etc.).

Some aggregators are Web based, meaning you can access them everywhere you have access to a browser. Some of the most popular online tools are Bloglines and Google Reader.

Screenshot of Google Reader

You may also aggregate news in a program installed locally, on your computer. A popular Windows application to do this is FeedDemon (see screenshot above).

You can usually switch from one program to the other by exporting the list of feeds. There’s a standard format for this, called OPML.

The technicals

An “RSS feed” is a file, just like any other file, that’s frequently updated to contain the most recent items. They’re usually downloaded from the Web, therefore having an URL.

For example, my blog has an RSS feed, accessible at this address: http://www.fsavard.com/flow/feed/. If you save it and open it in a text editor (ie. Notepad), you’ll see my latest blog posts marked up with <…> tags in a way that’s universally accepted. RSS is in fact the standard (file format) that specifies how this mark up is made (ie. how to let a program understand that this is the title, this is the summary, etc.). There are other formats (notably Atom), but we generally refer to feeds as RSS feeds anyway.

The standard icon for this can be seen at the top of this article, or in the right sidebar of this site (see “Follow my blog”).

The danger

Aggregating seems very neat in the beginning, but by the moment you realize how easy it is to add feeds, you rapidly accumulate lots of them, which translates in more and more news each day. The danger lies in spending, in the end, more time on daily news. The benefit is being more informed, of course.

That’s why you need to exercise balance, and learn to choose your feeds wisely. More on that in other posts.

References

• Video: RSS in plain english
• Wikipedia: Aggregator
• Wikipedia: List of feed aggregators

Credits

• Source of the RSS symbol above