After I posted about Philipp Lenssen’s poll of Blogspot blog’s, I thought: the guy who has to come up with a new “Blogs of Note” for Blogger’s dashboard every day must have the most frustrating job in the whole of Google. Half of the blogs he has to survey (and I reckon he must go through hundreds each day) is spam. Poor bastard.
RSS-feed.org is a beta site that lets you create a publicly accessible webpage that shows news from all your favourite news sources — as long as they have an RSS feed. Right now RSS-feed.org doesn’t allow you to add just any feed (only the ones they’ve selected), but the existence of this service only highlights that people want to have a say in how they have news displayed to them. RSS may be hot, but it’s not how everyone wants to consume news. A significant portion of people just don’t want to use a feed reader for whatever reason and Web 2.0 engineers need to take notice.
This week, I made Macgregator, a webpage that aggregates news in Mac-related topics that I’m interested in. Although I judiciously use an RSS feed reader, I don’t want to constantly consume Mac news. Although I’ve been using a Mac for over a decade, I’m just not that interested in the latest and the greatest in everything Mac. I sporadically read Mac stuff from a few sources and I needed a way that lets me do it conveniently without having to bombard me with reminders of that I’m missing out. I want to consume some news when I want and if I want to — not when some robot tells me to. For me, that’s why sites like RSS-feed.org will have a place in the future.