0xDECAFBAD - Tag: aggregators

An Accumulator for all my stuff

2007-12-25T05:25:16+00:00

No one's really noticed, but I've changed email providers about a dozen times in the past decade. And, that's because my email address hasn't changed — thanks very much to the wonderful and awesome Pobox.com.

Likewise, I've hopped from platform to platform in blogging and writing and generally emitting memelets from my brain. In contrast to Pobox.com though, anyone who could be bothered to follow me would have had to keep track of every new feed and site which happened to strike my fancy. Knowing myself, I don't expect that my wandering ways to change — so the number of feeds in which my stuff lands will only increase.

So, I'd like to fix that. In case you haven't seen it, I've started building an Accumulator for all the various feeds and accounts between which I'm distributing my attention and User Generated Content these days.

I'm hoping to make this the definitive one-stop-shop for following me and my crap, eventually offering feeds at the root of decafbad.com with facilities for picking and choosing what to include and what to leave out. Hopefully, this will leave me able to just simply point interested parties at decafbad.com, and let them explore from there — rather than wandering over to this blog that's mostly quiet these days.

And, of course, if in the end no one actually cares about my spew anyway — at least I'll have had fun with yet another new project.

Oh, and Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Vienna is now my weapon of choice for feeds

2007-01-02T21:37:48+00:00

In the last few days, I've switched news aggregators again - this time to Vienna.

I've got a long, long, long history of doing this - partially because of my serial enthusiasm, and partially because none of the aggregators I've used so far have satisfied all of my itches. Some tie up my laptop in terms of memory and CPU, some aren't fast enough UI-wise to help me really blaze through skimming, and some aren't flexible enough for me to tweak to my particular liking.

At this point, though, Vienna comes really close to what I've been wanting for years. It's open source (check it out!); uses WebKit to offer a theme-able feed item display (hello Colloquy!); and uses SQLite 3 for persistence (with schema documentation!). Out of the box, it's a pretty nice app, but it was even nicer when I started poking under the hood. I've even submitted my first small patch, which got accepted into the codebase.

When last I tried Vienna, it was on my poor old PowerBook G4 12" 867Mhz and it was a somewhat rough and bad tasting experience. At the time, NetNewsWire was my tool of choice, and Vienna was lacking some features - like, say, a user-sortable list of subscription folders and feeds. It also thrashed a lot and generally made me Force Quit it and move on. But now, on my new-ish MacBook Pro, the performance is stellar with my set of 500+ feeds and my few showstopper missing features are no longer missing.

Now, it seems like NetNewsWire is the app that thrashes for me and gets a Force Quit. I need to try NNW a bit more and figure out if it's just my initial import of subscriptions that drags things down - but Vienna's got me now. It's catching up mightily fast with the feature list of NNW. And, nothing beats open source software for tossing in a few tweaks to things that are just not quite doing what I'd like.

Again, since I'm a serial enthusiast, I have no idea if I'll be a regular contributor of patches to Vienna or even offer any commitment to the project - but I'm definitely happy with it at the moment.

Archived Comments

Craig
2007-01-02T22:20:49

Not sure if you care much for web-based aggregators, but ReBlog is my current favorite. I prefer the web-based aggregators because it allows me to have the same feed list between home and work... er, I mean my other home. http://www.reblog.org/ Hope this helps!
jose
2007-01-03T01:36:43

hi les

i had used vienna before, it has more features than NNW that i like (IIRC it had flagging etc), but it had just lousy performance. it consumed gobs of memory and CPU and invariably fell apart under my feed load (over 100 feeds).

i've tried probably a half dozen RSS readers on the Mac and they all stink. i miss RSS Bandit for Windows, which had all of the features i like but sadly runs on windows (which i don't use routinely). :-/

hope all is well.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-03T03:54:01

@Craig: I have tried using BlogLines and then Gregarius... ReBlog i've used before, too, but actually as a sort of newsdesk for a team at work - they skimmed through news stories and flagged items for republishing, which our CMS then plucked out of the outgoing ReBlog RSS feed. Nice aggregator. But, for me, nothing beats a desktop aggregator for swift skimming speed. For what it's worth, the Vienna team is working on BlogLines integration.

@jose: Not sure when you tried Vienna last - it seems to have improved markedly, though that might just be my mileage with the MacBook Pro now.
Michal Migurski
2007-01-03T08:17:14

I almost feel bad for wanting to switch. =)

Vienna is really good.
brian cors
2007-01-03T16:45:29

I checked out Vienna today a bit, and it's mucho nice.

However, the one thing that I use the most on NNW is the ability to sync to NewsGator. I use that on my cell to read feeds when I am out and about, and not at the desk. And that setup is particularly nice because it syncs history between NewsGator and NNW, so I dont end up reading things again that I have already read.

I'll definitely look at this as a freeware feed aggregator to use at work though, on our workstations. I need to get a decent, easy to use one for people here to learn about RSS. This might be the ticket. Thanks for pointing it out!
Adam Lipkin
2007-01-03T23:35:34

I've been a complete Google Reader addict for the last two months (although I also suffer from Serial Enthusiasm). It seems to toe the line nicely between web-based reader and true app, and combined with Firefox 2.0's nice handling of tabs and links (closing an article I head to from Google Read will pop me back to the Reader tab), it's integrated pretty seamlessly into my browsing.
jank
2007-01-08T21:57:02

I'm checking out Vienna, too, but, like Brian, having the ability to sync with a non-mac client (preferably a web-based one) is the biggest thing that NNW has going for it.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-08T22:42:53

Ironically, I've never spent much time with an aggregator that syncs with any other client - web-based or not. So, that's a feature of NNW I've never really appreciated or had much use for. I tend to have a laptop with me at all times, so my aggregator tends to go with me.
Peter Miller
2007-01-11T08:24:55

Thanks for opening my eyes to Vienna. I was using Bloglines for the longest time and never knew what I was missing!

content sniffing sucks

2006-11-24T06:28:11+00:00

If you’re using FF2.0 go here and you’ll see why.
No, I don’t want to subscribe to a PHP template used to generate Atom feeds, thank you very much.

Source: snellspace.com » Blog Archive » Content Sniffing Sucks

I know this is just taunting the Happy Fun Ball I said I was done taunting , but there's a false-positive for ya. :)

good gregarius

2006-08-18T04:43:20+00:00

Oh, and apropos my serial enthusiast ways, I've shacked up with a different news aggregator again. I was using newsRiver again, but the temporary lack of a spare server to run it on in the midst of the move had me feedless. So, after a brief flirtation with Bloglines - which went down promptly after I started using it - I switched using Gregarius. I have to say: This is a pretty keen aggregator. It doesn't support reading lists, but I have an itch to implement that support. Otherwise, the feed folders work pretty much how I'd like them to work - as a prioritized and stratified River of News. I might also think about hacking my evolving feed reader template as a drop-in theme for Gregarius.

Sharing attention while reading feeds

2006-01-03T14:45:01+00:00

Instead of reading their individual selections of RSS feeds privately, everyone should be encouraged to publish those aggregated feeds on the Web. ... the simple act of publishing those aggregations then makes them available to others, and thus makes them amenable to network effects in a way that they never can be if they're kept private.

Source: » It's time to bury RSS | Software as services | ZDNet.com

My current two responses to the above:

I love my popular links summary feed.
Attention.xml is starting to make sense to me.

Putting these two together could be a very powerful tool for bringing network effects to feed reading.

First off, one of the most useful feeds I have is my private Popular Links feed. Touting my book again, I showcase the script behind this thing in Chapter 15. I've had this running for well over a year, and it's always my first stop in the feed reader. Almost without fail, this tends to surface what's buzzworthy.

Basically, this script scans all the current entries of all my subscribed feeds for unique hyperlink URLs found in descriptions and summaries. It collates all entries by these links, then sorts by the number of entries under each link. A threshold is applied, filtering for links pointed to by 3 or more entries.

At the end, I see a new feed entry displaying the most linked-to things of the moment. Think of this as a kind of real-time PageRank. How's that for network effects?

I think this is sort of how Memeorandum works, only this is constrained to the feeds in my subscription list. I've been considering making this script a full-on service: Upload an OPML export from your aggregator, get your own Popular Links feed. I've got all the parts laying around but I haven't yet had time to put them together—but if it sounds like something useful, and possibly worth clicking a Paypal donation button, let me know!

Secondly: Attention.xml makes a lot of sense with regard to the above-quoted article. When I first heard about Attention.xml, I merely cocked my head at it and made a confused sound. This was before I caught the microformats bug, and before I realized that I started reinventing it a bit in my own ramblings.

Basically, Attention.xml is a feedroll enriched with data about the entries you've lately read from each feed. It's in an XHTML-based format which—albeit ugly in my opinion and in need of more elegant microformat influence—is indeed viewable in a browser. In a sense, this format is an auto-blog of my feed consumption. I was looking for hacks for my NetNewsWire in AppleScript, when I found this Attention.xml generator. Seeing the output of that, it all clicked.

Combining Attention.xml with my Popular Links algorithm could be a very powerful thing, methinks. Rather than waiting for my friends to tip over the laziness point to blogging about something, I could digest their shared Attention.xml files and collate the links they've merely read. In this way, I could build an AttentionRank for various things, and cause the cream to rise to the top in my feed reader.

I'm pretty sure that I'm playing catch-up here, but this all suddenly seems hot to me. And not to mention, it seems neat that I have all the pieces laying around to build it. The only bad thing is that I just don't have the time to spare—I've already spent too much time writing this blog post!

Anyway, maybe you'll hear more from me about this soon.

Archived Comments

Daniel Nicolas
2006-01-03T15:39:45

I think you could get away with charging $5 for a service like that. Maybe even $10 if it was all web-based with cool ajaxyness flowing out of it.
Anne Zelenka
2006-01-03T19:26:21

That Ch. 15 script looks very useful, though I haven't had a chance to try it yet. The attention.xml thing... interesting but don't know how it would work with three-panel newsreaders like Bloglines. I'm not necessarily interested in a post just because I skimmed the latest articles in a certain feed. I didn't know before I clicked on the feed name whether I'd be interested in the latest stuff. Much of the time I'm not interested.

What I'd like to see is some smart recommendation engine that watches how I read, how much time I spend on a certain article display, whether I click through the links it has, and even provides a "boring" button like some other commenter suggested so it could do some Bayesian filtering. That's getting far beyond what you've described here but what you're describing is a start on it.

Another somewhat different issue is that Memeorandum works by limiting itself to a certain very popular and generic set of issues. Once you have one Memeorandum for politics or tech do you need another? Might individual quirks of attention (like the fact that you are interested in Detroit and I am interested in Maui) make sharing individual attention.xmls less useful? I've never really gotten the social sharing bug though so maybe I'm just showing a lack of imagination.

But just because Memeorandum already exists doesn't mean there isn't a real opportunity. While it's easy to find the hot conversations on politics and tech in the blogosphere, other domains are poorly aggregated and filtered, if at all. I follow mom blogs and feminist blogs and nothing like Memeorandum or digg or reddit exists for those yet there are regularly hot topics that ripple through them. What you describe could be used to build something for those and other domains on the web but is there room for everyone to do it individually? Or will people gravitate to one or a few sites that do a good job of highlighting popular and important conversations in certain well-defined domains?

These are just my raw thoughts on it... your ideas are inspiring.
Phil Wilson
2006-01-04T16:38:10

Presumably your subscription list needs to be of a certain size before you can start extracting interesting URLs or you'll just have 20 URLs mentioned twice and 50 URLs mentioned once.

If you were to just read the short head of your popular items list, would this actually be encouraging people to be infovores rather than normal information consumers (where you read or at least skim all of the items in your aggregator)? i.e. the data only starts working for you when you collect enough feeds. Gosh, you could have your own little long-tail on your desktop ;)
Bill Seitz
2006-01-06T16:45:16

have you look at at TailRank?

http://tailrank.com/

Google Reader vs Microsoft start.com

2005-10-26T16:13:21+00:00

You know how I dissed Google Reader last month? Consider it still dissed. In fact, checking in again on Microsoft's start.com makes me think Google has a lot to learn about making a feed aggregator. I still prefer my own in-progress aggregator UI, but start.com has me thinking about ideas to steal.

Archived Comments

Bob Lee
2005-10-26T18:12:20

How does start.com differ from Google's personalized home page (I don't use either, but you've piqued my curiosity).
l.m.orchard
2005-10-26T18:25:48

Well, from what I can tell versus Google's personalized home page, start.com seems more open to defining "Gadgets" along the lines of Widgets on Mac OS X Tiger. Though, that's really neither here nor there with respect to a "pure" feed aggregator. So, maybe start.com and Google Reader are apples and oranges to compare in the first place. (I have to admit I'd mostly forgotten about Google's personalized home page.)

But, the whole start.com UI thing just feels like a quicker, nicer presentation of feeds. I like the in-page detail overlay when you click on a headline, versus just skipping straight to the link. Google's UI feels pretty clunky to me.
Bob Lee
2005-10-26T19:03:19

Ah, the popup is kind of neat. I follow more than 250 feeds daily though. I need something like Reader (actually Reader wasn't fast enough, so I use NetNewsWire synced to Bloglines now).
l.m.orchard
2005-10-26T19:09:29

Oh, yeah, start.com is a bit too slow for me too—but it's faster than Google Reader. Currently, my favorite UI for speed is my own:

http://www.decafbad.com/blog_attachments/miniagg-1.jpg

But, I've been trying to think of ways I could tile feeds into columns to maybe pack more per page in front of my eyes. (ala start.com)
Nick
2005-10-26T20:55:32

I went from Bloglines to Googles for about 2 weeks, but I finally gave up on it, I just couldn't get used to the interface, and didn't like the way it that it just dumped the feeds at you without any order or control. I went back to bloglines for now, but I'd like to setup something on my own server.. (I picked up this really cool RSS book, just haven't had the time to read it yet.)

Google Reader is good

2005-10-08T17:47:15+00:00

For what it's worth, I still feel like I've been unfair to the guys at Google over Reader.

I know how much work must've gone into that thing, because I know how something like that could've been built. I really think it's just because it's not the right kind of app for me, and I'd like to see someone make that app. And, I'm also a bit burnt out on the whole AJAX Madness buzz.

Thing is, Reader is so good at being what it is. I'm just critical because it's good at being what I don't want.

Archived Comments

jperkins
2005-10-08T18:15:57

The issue that I have with Google's reader stem from a rushed to market feel that I think that it has. As a developer, I'm sure that you've been in the position where suits see a business opportunity and decide to launch an app that's not ready. That's what the Google reader feels like to me. More so when the acquisition of Ranchero (owner of NetNewsWire) earlier this week is taken to account. For example, the lack of rudimentary autodiscovery in supplied urls. That's a no brainer to add and yet it's missing. I suppose that the developers could've neglected that feature, but that seems like something that would've been added in a later internal development release prior to a public beta launch.

Eh, it's all supposition on my part, but if it is the case that perceived business opportunity outweighed holding off a bit and shipping a solid app then that's not a good sign for Google at all.
Sencer
2005-10-08T22:38:56

where suits see a business opportunity and decide to launch an app that’s not ready. That’s what the Google reader feels like to me.

That's exactly what I though. After an initial warm-up phase where I liked it, I decided it's not for me, and the app feels very, very beta to me. Not that it has errors, but it's doing very little to be actually helpful. Especially after an import I feel pretty much lost. Everything is new, no way to mark stuff as read. Upon revisiting everything is unmarked again. No way to scan snippets. That which is there maybe nice, but it's not useful enough to get me to switch.
Nick
2005-10-09T03:13:04

Yeah, it's not quite perfect, but it's also a Google LABS project. So, it's not really meant for 'release' as much as it's a proof of concept sort of thing..

BTW Les, I fixed the comment thingy.. It's called loading Wordpress..