(2002-05-29) b

Jon Udell on personal RSS aggregators. Publishing an RSS channel, and subscribing to channels, closes the communication loop and creates a new interactive medium. Part of me still finds RSS kinda useless, just preferring a system like BloGs which alerts you to when a WebLog has updated, after which you can just go there to read it. This model obviously doesn't scale to tracking 100 blogs, but I'm not completely sure that's a behavior that makes sense. On the other hand, watching a large number of channels for individual items matching an interest, to create a "synthetic channel", could be very cool; ironically, that sort of automated filtering is just the thing Jon says has been replaced by human filtering.