Will we see more intelligent feedreaders?

26.01.2005 - 01:06 / filled under default

Yes the article is from August, but this glassdog speaks to my heart:

Where are the extrapolations, based on the data? Where is Bayesian filtering? Why isn’t there auto-correlation between like items? Why isn’t there sorting by link popularity? Or inter-linking between feeds? Why can’t I rank feeds or categories higher than others?

Why can’t I rate items and let the cumulative ratings over time determine feed rankings? Why isn’t there some statistical combination of each of the above to put what I’m actually going to care about at the top of the list and the discussions about which syndication protocol is best at the bottom?

Yes please. If I remove my own feeds and some special search feeds from the blogs I read, I have about 800 feeds.

No, I don't read every feed each day. It's not that much and sometimes I even do catch-up *gasp*. Some folders have my full interest each time I run bloglines, some folders will only be read once a while. I do unsubscribe if I find the content to be not of my liking or if the presentation of the feeds is crap.

For example there are perhaps 4 blogs where I accept they only provide headers. If people just want to provide a teaser so I have to visit their sites, please let me tell you: I read most of the item in the corresponding blog. I use my feedreader to determine what to read. Each folder I go through has probably several hits which I open in the background and will read after finishing a folder.

And *if* you want me to accept abridged feeds, do what every good marketeer would do: provide a teaser. And not only the first 100 chars of your post. Make me curious. More work? Yes. Do you want visitors or not?

The folders are a first adjustment to my reading habbits. I tried to rearrange them a while ago into a more 'logical' order but I could not work with it. I got desperate and switched completly back to my order and felt comfortable again. Without knowing I had arranged them in an order which suited my reading habbits very well.

Not only since I discovered podcasting, I noticed that I would like multiple folders a feed could be in. But with my rising interest in podcasting and business blogging (again) it gets harder to work around. I read the feeds coming with the podcast to take a look in the shownotes. The podcast I have subscribed are in my folder 'podcast synced and subscribed'. Some podcast are decided on their production notes (folder sometimes), some I just follow for pure interest.

But as I especially like podcasting bloggers, I had to take them out of their usual folder and put them into 'podcasting bloggers'. But take Amy Gahran for example. Has a podcast, is blogger and business blogger with the PBA also. Which would make one feed in three different places which of course should get marked read if read in one place. And she is just one example.

I would like different views on feeds. Intelligent folders ("these feeds have not seen an update in the last 2 month", "these feed have the word cookies in it and are served with a latte", "other users liked this article very much"). And rating and scoring. And keyboard shortcuts. Please notify me if you found something like this.

[Oh btw: If you want me to discover something like Newsgator - I won't sign up to see some screenshots of the online version. Screenshots are first.]