I dropped two generalist feeds from my Google RSS Reader, both well ranked and known. I’m convinced feeds need to be specific. These feeds publish a couple of good posts per quarter but the rest of the content (such as US election candidates) I couldn’t care less about. I want specific information else in some cases everything from an identity or a friend.
Some people might only be interested in my trading views as an example. I had a spike in traffic which seemed to be internal Microsoft people checking out my Facetime for Microsoft Bought Cheap post. However I doubt they would be interested in my personal content. To support specific RSS content better we really need a couple of elements. Mainstream bloggers adopting multiple feed approach instead of one bulk feed. Otherwise better filtering mechanisms in RSS readers. There’s other ways but these seem the most probable and some are already in play.
The old economy data management shops like Reuters and Bloomberg have a lot to teach the Y-Gen reader developers.
My dream RSS reader would:
- give me tight 1 line snippets of blog posts in a list.
- allow me to exclude posts using tag filters.
- allow me to adjust font size so I can jam more posts in a page.
- add posts in from the top, waterfall style.
- highlight new post arrivals.
