Key mechanism behind the BlogWeb.

Single-user aggregators (aka [Rss Reader])

• Radio Userland

• Net News Wire

• PeerKat

• Slash Dot lets the user define slashboxes, which use RSS. (This was the original style of usage, at netscape.com.)

• AbbeNormal:RssReaders; also blogspace has a shorter list

• there are some scalability issues associated with the growing use of personal aggregators - see Publish And Subscribe.

Shared server/services: (in some sense these don't belong here, but they seem potentially competitive, so worth keeping together)

• DayPop doesn't use RSS, it just scrapes the front page .

• Same for BlogDex.

  • Yuck, I just realized that since BlogDex and DayPop focus on the home/front page of each blog, if you just put summaries on the front page, with a "More..." link to the fulltext (or, as in my site, have a separate WiKi page), the external links don't get picked up!

• OReilly [MeerKat] uses RSS.

• Web Logs Com: doesn't really handle RSS, just "pings" from blogs - it keeps track of when blogs have been updated.

  • BloGs provides a personalized listing service based on the data from Web Logs Com.

An interesting "question" is whether one "should" read someone's blog just in the reader's Rss Aggregator, or whether he should see items that interest him and jump to the source blog to read there?

• Victor Lombardi whines effectively about why going-to-the-source is better.

Conversely, "should" bloggers include entire entries in their RSS, or just enough to let the aggregator-reader decide whether he wants to click through?

• even if you as a writer want people to come to your blog to read, maybe you should send the entire contents so that their increasingly-intelligent Universal Inbox could apply some filtering rules based on the content.

  • I seem to recall somebody (Jon Udell?) noting an idea where an RSS channel would include attributes defining whether an aggregator should display certain fields - so you might send the full feed but a well-behaved aggregator would only use the data as you requests. What do you do about poorly-behaved aggregators? Block them with robots.txt? What if they are too poorly-behaved to follow that? (See Mark Pilgrim's experience with News Monster.)

• I also seem to recall Jon Udell talking about publishing multiple RSS feeds, some with full contents and others without.

  • I suppose you could publicly provide a link to the terse version, and pass the [URL] of the verbose version only to friends. But as people automatically publish their sub list to their Blog Roll, the verbose [URL] would leak out.

User Options Recent Changes Help Page