Feed Grazers and disposable RSS feeds
Interesting notion of "feed grazing" from James Corbett and Danny Ayers. James actually came up with the concept - this explanation is from a comment he left on Danny's blog:
"I’m actually coming to the conclusion that the whole subscriptions mindset is a problem and that in future we’ll ‘graze’ for the most part instead of subscribing. As Zigbee sensors, RFID chips and GPS trackers proliferate we’ll be drowing in an RSS-everywhere world if we don’t change our approach.
We don‚Äôt subscribe to all the sensory feed in physical world, we sample, nibble, taste, glance. Taskable and OPod (and whatever Kosso‚Äôs working on) are first generation ‚ÄúFeed Grazers‚Ä? IMHO. They allow you to graze feeds without ever subscribing. All we need is for static OPML directories to proliferate and for OPML search engines (like Gada.be) to improve at building multi-level hierarchies on the fly."
Intrigued, I checked out the apps that James referenced. Taskable is described as "a new kind of RSS and OPML browser built into the Windows taskbar notification area." OPod is "an AJAX OPML and RSS viewer widget that you can embed in any web page you like." Uh, right. I'm none the wiser.
In another post, James calls them "on-demand feeds" - which is more grokable. So you only need these feeds for a short time, then you dispose of them... My Auckland friend Charles Coxhead has been exploring the notion of disposable feeds too.
It's an interesting concept and one which I obviously need to think more on - and read more of James' posts (and Charles too, when he gets around to posting about his experiments). 2006 seems to have become the year when we've realised that RSS, for all the benefits it brings of being able to subscribe to information, doesn't actually solve the core problem of information overload. Perhaps feed grazing, or on-demand feeds, is a step closer to solving the overload problem...
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Thanks Richard. I've been trying to explain my views on Feed Grazing for a while but unfortunately I've been struggling to convey the idea. However, I think one of my better explainations was in the post entitled - "Do Purple Cows graze on gRaSS?". I think I was trying to be too clever for my own good ;-)
It here -
http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/2006/01/do_purple_cows_.html
Danny has been giving good push back and I certainly need to refine the notion somewhat but its good that people are discussing it now. Over to the experts :-)
No, I don't agree that we will graze and not commit. I think we will go in the opposite direction, we will invest more and more, but just not in the way which has previously been experienced or expected. Just as we visit more sites (grazing) we actually commit more (through social bookmarking). That's a central tenet behind my writings: http://reblogger.wordpress.com
Grazing or committing? I think we're going to do more of both... but we'll need (slightly) different tools for each.
It really takes a lot for a site to make it into my Bloglines collection: that's the moment when I really commit to its content. But I also see a case for feeds of a limited lifespan - maybe order tracking on an e-commerce site or with a courier company, maybe progress on a helpdesk call. It's the feed's raison d'etre that is disposable, not my commitment to the feed. Once the order is fulfilled, or the support call resolved, the feed has served its purpose. (We already get this sort of data on web pages; moving it to RSS shouldn't be a huge effort?)
I imagine a widget (?) that sits on my desktop, allows drag-and-drop subscription (allowing for passwords), and one-click feed deletion. It needs to poll for updates on a relatively regular basis, and notify me via popup or sound. No need for anything serious like OPML import/export, I don't think. I wrote something about this a few weeks ago... guess I need more readers. :(
I personally like the idea of ad-hoc RSS. There are many entries that I would like to subscribe to but don't really want to clutter up my Bloglines with. It's daunting enough to see 269 feeds; I don't need 1,000.