0xDECAFBAD - Tag: attention

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/

Subscriptions are attention, but what about blogrolls?

2005-11-27T21:29:53+00:00

But today, for my rss feeds importing and exporting needs, OPML far outshines xoxo.

Yes, there are 6 XOXO outlines on my front page. There are six lists. But I don’t have an easy way to import one of those XOXO outlines in my FeedDemon application in order to receive the latest blog items from those blogs that I link to. If there IS an easy way to do it, please enlighten me.

Source: XOXO vs. OPML at DLTQ.org

Ah hah. Here's a use case where I agree OPML has undeniably become king: Exporting and importing feed aggregator subscriptions.

Because Radio UserLand was the first aggregator to really take off—and because OPML is Radio's lingua franca, any new aggregators have needed to speak OPML to facilitate migration. It grew from there, with nearly every aggregator supporting some basic form of OPML import/export for subscription lists. OPML has won the "feed subscription list format war" before there was ever a notion that there might be such a war.

Now, I'm woefully behind on all the buzz connecting OPML with attention. But, my impression so far is that people want to share their subscription list, exported from their aggregator of choice. That comes out as OPML. So then, the reasoning is that because aggregators produce OPML, and aggregators are powerful attention managers, OPML is the lingua franca of attention. Is this about right?

I guess where I go from there is with this: My aggregator's OPML export is private data for interchange between my other aggregators. Today, I'm about as comfortable with sharing my OPML with you as I am sharing QIF files exported from my bank account. Sure, it's an easy export process, but it's not meant for you.

In my OPML, I've got subscriptions that I've paid for, that I've password protected, and that give me details derived from my server logs. I don't want to share that, at least not directly. I've been asked for my OPML by a few people so far, and every time, I need to dig through it and be sure I'm not giving away any secrets. Maybe this is where I'm a bit confused about the attention hype.

You see, what I do want to share is called a blogroll. Blogrolls are public declarations of attention, published on blogs.

Since revamping this blog, I haven't yet gotten around to throwing a proper blogroll together, but I'm planning on it. And, when I do share it, it'll be in HTML list form. And when I build it, it may start as an OPML export from my aggregator, but I'll have to spend some time weeding through it.

I guess I don't have a clear picture here yet, but directly shipping around exports from my aggregator subscriptions gives me the willies. And further, basing anything big on OPML gives me the willies too.

Nowadays, sharing things on the web feels like XHTML and microformats to me. OPML for interchange between aggregators is one thing—but on the web at large, sinking deeper roots into OPML and the whole Rube Goldberg array of machinery following behind it feels like a backward step to me.

Maybe microformats are the new XML-geekery, but I don't want a new, "cleaner" XML format—I just want to more cleverly use the format that everyone's been using to share outlines and declarations of attention in blogs.

Archived Comments

Aristotle Pagaltzis
2005-11-27T21:37:59
Check out Uche Ogbuji's pertinent posts:
Adam Lindsay
2005-11-28T11:48:40

My aggregator’s OPML export is private data for interchange between my other aggregators.

See, that's where you've lost me. Regardless of OPML's suckiness (yes, I've gazed on it, first hand), export/import interchange formats are precisely the sort of thing to be open standards. I spent many of the prime years of my life working on MPEG, and that, if anything, was my take-home message. The interchange/glue formats are precisely what need to be scrutinised and kept in public view.

Is OPML good for anything else? Not really. Should it be promoted for all one's outlining needs? Not really. Does XOXO have an easy time of gaining mindshare, considering most people's miniscule outlining needs? Not really.