How Many of You Subscribe to Topic Feeds?
5 years ago I wrote a prediction about RSS here on ReadWriteWeb. I proclaimed that "in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people."
I think it's fair to say that I was totally wrong on that prediction. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, in particular, many more people 'subscribe' to people than topics (subscribe a.k.a. 'follow' or 'friend'). And I'm glad my prediction didn't pan out, because the social graph of people is much more interesting to follow than a bunch of keywords. But it begs the question: what happened to all the promise of tracking topics using RSS?
While many of us use Google Alerts and apps like LazyFeed to track keywords and topics, that's still a relatively geeky thing to do.
In a follow-up post in January 2005, entitled Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS, I wrote that "tools will evolve to let people easily set-up personalized searches for information relevant to them and subscribe to the results [using RSS]." I wasn't suggesting that conversations or people are unimportant. On the contrary, as I explained in '05, "topic/tag/remix feeds will make it even easier to find the conversations that matter to you and indeed you are more likely to meet new people and discover new points of view."
That has certainly happened, but not so much due to RSS - more because of Facebook and Twitter. While RSS did expand over those 5 years, social networking services became much more popular as ways to track information.
Also, online media has matured a lot over the past 5 years. Nowadays people commonly subscribe to blogs and other news media across a variety of niches - and that's how they keep up-to-date on topics of interest to them. For example, I subscribe to NPR All Songs Considered and Pitchfork (amongst other sites) to get the latest alternative music news.
Both of these trends (the rise of the Social Graph; and maturing of professional niche media) have made topic feeds from the likes of Google Alerts less attractive than I thought they'd be 5 years ago.
However, I still believe in the promise of topic-based RSS feeds. Indeed I currently use a number of services to track a set of topics of interest to me. One is Google Alerts, which I have set up as RSS feeds in Google Reader. Plus I use a couple of services that launched just recently, LazyFeed and Regator.
Sadly, the promising services of 2005 - such as PubSub and Feedster - haven't made it as far as 2010 (although last year PubSub was born again under new management).
It's possible that LazyFeed and Regator won't last either, but let's hope that a startup soon finds the key to unlock the potential of topic feeds.
In the meantime I'm curious to know if you subscribe to topic feeds? If so which tools, if any, do you use to track topics? Please leave a comment. I'll write a follow-up post later this week, highlighting the best apps that are mentioned.
Image credit: shizhao
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Interesting post. First off, no I don't use topic feed. But there's a bigger question -- do I even use RSS feeds?
In all honesty, Twitter has kinda replaced RSS feeds for me. I have about eight RSS feeds (usually for blogs), but I follow the blog's writers and creators, so I get updates for those said blogs, plus the ability so socially networks with those writers.
You might disagree with me, but Twitter might be the future of the RSS feed!
I agree with William - a lot of this is replaced by Twitter - more good links on topics of interest, than trying to hope to find all the good blogs (or get a google alert set up that isn't mostly junk or repeats)
Does it mean I've done away with my RSS feeds? no - I still have a TON... way too fond of google reader, lol
Topic feeds are too prone to spam and low-quality or low-relevance "hits". I've tried LazyFeed and a few other variations and don't find them that useful. I might if I was obsessively following a particular topic and didn't want to miss anything.
On websites that allow it though, I sometimes subscribe to a topic feed or search phrase from a particular source. But never from multiple sources.
By using source-based feeds, I do better with avoiding spam, robots and content fluff.
OK, one exception - I do have a Google Alert for the organisation I work for. However, it is not exempt from spam, robots and fluff at all. The results are pretty poor (lots of copy-and-pasted scams and ripoffs of other people's content), so this is simply one case where I do put up with the rubbish in order to see everything.
I follow topics using Twitter search, and the keyword subscription feature in Delicious (which sucks big time). Still finding something that fits my needs.
I think it's important to remember that RSS and Twitter are both (in part, anyway) just delivery mechanisms -- regardless of how you're receiving the information, how it's selected, grouped, and sorted (topic-focused or person-focused, keywords, popularity, frequency of mention, what-have-you) before being delivered is a separate set of questions.
Because RSS readers start with the premise that you're telling the reader what you're interested in by subscribing to specific feeds, it's taken a surprisingly long time for people to dig into the idea that an "RSS reader" might be a tool for discovering content, rather than just a more efficient way to consume content.
A couple of the tools that we'll be rolling out in the next week or so under the wow.ly umbrella explore topical discovery of content on Twitter (though the output isn't actually a Twitter feed). Between the classification of people that has started happening with Twitter lists, freqency/timing of posted data, and more standard keyword/phrase searching there are interesting possibilities there.
indeed i use Yahoo pipes to gather my news feeds
i put them in google reader etc.. to filter them
i also use alerts to get nice bews feeds which i post to
to Facebook, Posterous....
In todays information overflow, subscribing to feeds or following sources on Twitter is simply not enough. There's a clear need to filter the received information to get what's interesting to YOU. There are already several solutions in this domain (such as ours and the one by My6Sense), and we expect to see this domain growing significantly in the near future.
I'm not a huge techie, so I'll respond by describing my philosophy of gathering information:
I'm a voracious consumer of information -- much of it political -- and I've played a bit with Google Alerts and Twitter, but have never been able to get into the feed idea. I value the relationship I have with people and institutions and as a consequence go to trusted and reliable source such as Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post, and Open Left on the moderate left, Amy Goodman or Noam Chomsky on the strong left, National Review and occasionally Drudge on the right, and Politico in the center. I also pay attention to what advocacy groups such as the ACLU or Electronic Frontier Foundation have to say, and do pay attention to the voices of the populist right. I'm making a pitch for quality of information from trusted sources with whom I have a relationship, that is quality over quantity.
On the other hand, I love checking in with TweetMeme or Google Trends to see what's buzzing. I think the challenge to the old journalistic institutions is healthy for the marketplace of ideas and I'm concerned about a decent business model for investigative journalism.
A few years ago I also thought topic feeds could be big. I still think they can but not in the form of search-based alerts for keywords like you get with Google Alerts.
Google's recent news experiment (I forget the name) is the closest to what I am talking about. Say I was too busy to follow the Tiger Woods debacle as it unfolded, I want a service that would let me select that topic and show me the key developments in the order they unfolded - in a summarised form. It would also have allowed me to subscribe to a curated feed of summarised news on the topic as it happened.
The key I think is for such feeds to be curated. Perhaps I haven't set them up properly but I find myself ignoring most of the feeds I get from my Google Alerts because they contain a lot of stuff I'm not interested in.
I still use various topic feeds. But as people are commenting, they tend to have a lot of noise.
I think that there will be other kinds of topic feeds in the future that use a combination of source curation and social signals to reduce the noise. There's quite a bit of that going on already, but it's only going to get better as it becomes easier to use social signals/social filters.
Hi Richard - I certainly hope Regator doesn't bite it anytime soon! ;-)
Actually we're just about to unveil a completely rebuilt and redesigned regator in a few weeks time. One of the things we're making far more prominent on the site are personalized topic streams. :-)
Keep an eye out as we've learnt a lot (we made some rookie mistakes) in our first year and also jumped on some new opportunities. We're working our butts off to make regator the easiest and most useful way for anyone to find and consume great blog content any way they like on the web or iphone.
The model of simply subscribing to sources doesn't scale as their number grows. That's why aggregations services such as digg or tweetmeme, that extract most popular current content, are so successful.
I think that the next generation of services, such as Cascaad, will bring personalized feeds that filter the entire realtime web for relevant topical items, extrapolating from the sources you already follow.
One of the things we're making far more prominent on the site are personalized topic streams. :-)
There is a wide variation for what is labeled as a "Topic". It really depends on how broad or narrow the topic is, and whether it's a well defined topic or a macro-topic.
If you're going by Topic feeding, you're relegating the quality outcome to the aggregator, and your satisfaction will depend on: 1) how good of a job that aggregator is doing, 2) the degree of matching between what's behind the topic and your exact needs.
The thing that's often missing from Topic-feeding is the Context. Take Twitter as a "topic". Is it Twitter in the context of social networking, social media, the enterprise, news gathering, user-generated content, customer relations, etc.? These are all different topics. I'm biased and will say that the future is still bright for following well-designed topics, that are complemented by people-based content feeding that enrich the original stream. Perhaps, the "geeks" will opt for an nth degree of manipulation at the RSS level, while business-minded users will trust professionally managed Topics that are well curated (the later being Eqentia's model).
Note the context for the above remarks are from someone whose business is to properly customize and manage smartly aggregated (micro/mega) topics using semantic technologies.
I use Lazyfeed and Guzzle.it for topic feeds. One of the benefits of topic feeds which hasn't been mentioned is that they're a great way to discover new blogs you hadn't heard of and then add them to your 'people'(blog) feed.
And I disagree with both of you. Twitter replace RSS....That should never happen
RSS is an "Open" format for transporting and displaying dynamic content.
Thats close to saying that google is the internet...
http://www.factoetum.com/factoetum/Bruce_Wayne+Favorite_Technology_Terms.rss
I tend to agree with many of the other commenters. I have tried with various topic feed options over time, but they are either too spammy or too repetitive with my people feeds. Even on Twitter, I have not been terribly thrilled with the results. Of course, I do still have feeds based on my most important topic: ME!
Things I've tried: Alltop, Technorati topic feed, PubSub (and many other defunct blog search toys), Yahoo Pipes, Twitter hashtags.
I am still using a Google Alerts (email) on a topic that isn't covered too heavily on the web.
The other effect is that a lot of people have moved away from blogging and the blog-specific topic feeds are less busy than they used to be. Which means that topic feeds need to be flexible and account for content that might pop up in many other places.
Bruce, we're not saying it can replace it in that kind of sense - but rather - in the ways that we are using RSS feeds to try and keep up with the best new posts in our fields and related fields - we are using Twitter for the same function. Doesn't mean Twitter=RSS or Twitter replaces RSS for all purposes or anything of the sort. Just means that for our particular use of RSS feeds, twitter is becoming a rival for providing that kind of information.
Tried ensembli?
http://www.ensembli.com
Cheers!
Carl
Google Alerts only. For specific word combos only e.g.: "eco initiatives in the UK."
I agree there is a gap in the market at present BUT is this not part of a larger problem: the need for semantic web search which is focussed and relevant rather than comprehensive and less than useful.
Sort it out Google!
Good post. It is surprising how few people use topic feeds. Actually, it is surprising how few people use RSS feeds of any sort - topical or otherwise. I was at dinner the other night with 2 non-techie, but very accomplished professionals (one finance, one medicine) and they had absolutely no idea what an RSS feed or feed reader was.
I use topic feeds generated by Google Alerts, Google News, and Twitter - not nearly so many as direct source feeds, but still they are very important. For my topics, Twitter is useful, but Google generates far more relevant stuff.
To clean them up a bit, I use ANDs, ORs, parens, and so forth - e.g., ("phrase A" OR "phrase B") AND ("phrase 3" OR "phrase 4"). If you get the search command right, the results are pretty clean - no complaints.
How specific you have to get depends a lot on the popularity and/or the 'genericness' of the keywords/phrases. In my case, several topics are combinations of very, very generic words. They require some finagling to get clean results. For unique terms ('readwriteweb'), no extra work is required.
I use Twitter Search to generate RSS feeds out of Twitter, so I can combine my Twitter, Google, and direct source feeds altogether in one place to get comprehensive view of a given topic.
I have not used the new tools you mention, but will check them out.
I use Swamii, although it's had a lot of downtime lately and Google alerts. Tried Ensembli and Guzzle.it bu they just didn't work well for my topics of interest.
The weakness of topic feeds (regardless their topic) is that few people are so profoundly interested in a limited set of topics that they want to be on top of all related developments in real time. Most people are more opportunistic - they are interested in some specific topic at some set period of time, for some specific purpose.
For general news, by far the most rewarding experience is to discover interesting articles on topics you did not previously know you would find interesting. This means aggregating and browsing through articles or sites either created by or selected by sources whose judgement you trust. Under this scenario, you discard most of the articles you browse through, actively read a few, and go on to comment or recommend only a fraction of the ones that you read.
I prefer google alerts with a topic customization.Infact instead of choosing a topic, I prefer news based feeds which updates me every second.
I use Netvibes to aggregate feeds, couldn't live without it.
Topic based RSS feeds are a godsend when you subscribe to high volume sites that cover a lot of topics. There are some sites out there that dump 100+ posts a day and there is no way I could or would even want to keep up with all of their content.
I think topics are a layer on top of other items, not the primary item.
I'm slightly in the middle on this. The only feeds for topics I subscribe to are local news for where I and my family live, and some from reddit. Other than that, everything is strictly RSS-based for sites/people exclusively. Like one commenter said, topics are tough because there's a lot of repetition of information, inaccuracy, off-topicness, and so forth.
I find using Twitter to topics is entirely pointless. When you follow tech people, 90% of the time you've got to follow a lot of them to be able to get the full gist of a conversation or idea that they're floating around, otherwise you're entirely lost.
Topic feeds have little significance. In 95% cases, bloggers don't update the old post. A new post created to add new topics
I used to subscribe to topics with Google Alerts, and then read them in Google Reader.
But lately I have started to use Twitter (with Lists) as my news source.
It works pretty good, and it's pretty nice to not have "1000+ unread items".
Google Alerts as an RSS in an RSS reader is still by far the best way to monitor topics. The RSS for search queries on Twitter aren't bad if your topic is very specific and there isn't a lot of noise. RFID would fall under that category.
What we need is a topic alert service where you can specify the source to cut out the noise - For example, I'd want to track news tagged with "Sensors" on ReadWriteWeb, Techcrunch, O'Reilly Radar, Wired etc. When you can limit the number of sources, and then filter for topic, the exercise becomes far more useful.
Anyone know of a service that can do this?
I followed RWW's steps to create a Netvibes page that filters postranked blogs on topics of interest via OPML coding. It is helpful knowing I'm only reading the popular posts rather than EVERYthing a particular blogger is posting. I can follow MORE blogs that way. However, I like the idea mentioned in another comment of using Lazyfeed / Guzzle.it - type readers to discover NEW sources of information, (a challenge with the customized OPML script that limits me to specific blogs).
I do feed a google news search of certain topics into my twitter account. It keeps the account active during the day and attracts people who want to follow these topics (which are the same as my blog's topic). I am surprised more people haven't discovered this.
Nice post.
I find that RSS isn't all that simple when you're faced with all the content noise. Recently I have been working on my own system for RSS feed and topic management that allows me to search for topics within sources I choose, kinda like Steffan is suggesting.
I would not see any of your posts if it were not for RSS Feeds. I have no interest in the chatter found on twitter. Status updates are of little interest to me.
Twitter, RSS, Google Alerts each has their place - my strategy isn't too polished but its working.
Twitter - I try and limit the amount of people I follow to 100.
RSS Feeds - if I stop following you, I might subscribe to your feed instead.
RSS Feeds deliver me items I RT on Twitter, which seems to get me a few new followers a week.
If you don't have blog/site I'm unlikely to follow you.
Google Alerts - I use it judiciously to see
a) what is being said about me (1)
b) spy on what my competition is up to (2)
c) I have 1 or 2 kinda robotic link gathering searches I use to find random clients to approach.
Google Alerts, the key is getting the search string right, as was said previously.
I visit the "planets" (lang, RDF, Xml etc) far less now, as it is my perception that there is far less on them - but what is there is still worth visiting.
@ #31
you can specify sources in yahoo pipes. it's highly configurable.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
Great post Richard and a beautiful discussion :)
I can see that after you have published the "5 reasons why RSS readers still rock" last week you continue to venture into the field, I hope you find soon the right solution for you.
I agree with @woofed that subscriptions should be filtered, and to enroll in the follow up and back up my opinion I provide you with this link http://tinyurl.com/y873gk7 where I explain how the information arriving from feeds should be structured, filtered even shared with your followers thus taking the rss feed out of the erroneously private box they have been occupying in a dusty reader.
Plus lets take a look from the other hand - we as geeks do cope with readers, aggregators and the rest, but will our mums? I look at the rss feeds more like powerful automated streams that can feed up niche sites, for example http://favit.com/kinita - (sorry it is in greek, but this is the example on top of my mind right now) - so this site is of great benefit both for his owner - me, and the people that emits the emission - great context is created around a certain topic and it is all openly shared with everyone on the net.
Following people is great, but I get annoyed when they start sharing pics of their lunch etc, with the topic feeds I have no such problems - so I stick to them.
topikality, we started this project with the aim of:
- Hiding the complication of RSS
- Personalising the feed to each individuals area of interest
- Eliminating the clutter and information overload
Currently in Public Beta.
We're addressing this issue head-on at MashLogic. RSS is a lovely but hard-edged protocol that is much better leveraged under the hood and away from the eyes of dewy-eyed users. Our premise is that you specify the sources you prefer & trust (e.g. RWW) and we will surface related articles from RWW as you browse the web.
For illustrative purposes, install this bookmarklet: http://mashlogic.com/brands/bookmarklet/rww_demo and click it on the RWW Home Page. You will see a rash of red links appear. Mouse over any of these links to see related articles from RWW. Now try this on similar pages, e.g. G*gaOm, M*shable and you'll see links that bring you right back to RWW.
Instead of subscribing to the RSS feed, you are automatically shown links to contextually relevant articles on RWW as you browse the web. We call these MashFeeds.
If you install the MashLogic browser extension, you can program your own MashFeeds and links will automatically appear on every web page (without having to click on the bookmarklet on each page). You can do a whole lot more with the extension, but I'll stop with the propaganda.
We use Topikality. We like the way it learns what articles are relevant for our business and filters out the rest. The interface is also simple.
Lazy is a destination service - you have to visit the lazy website every now & then to check. In a world of destinations competing for user's daily browsing window it should extend its service to be delivered anywhere on the web -specially through the more populated web destinations - e.g. popular social networks.
Lazy will succeed because of its basic proposition of organising the information on the web and serving the way a user needs it -- infact service that proposes this & manages to do this smartly has a great potential.
But Lazy will fail if it doesn't address the destination issue I mention above.
I've been beta-testing Topikality for while now. It uses machine learning techniques to find new content associated with a topic, and even though it initially uses keywords as a seed, the machine learning approach adds more precision and extra classification.
With Topikality you get to vote up and down what it finds which further improves the searching.
Let's say you want to get a feel for how your company is regarded by the online community. You could create 3 topics all based on the same keyword search (your company name). Call one topic 'Sounds positive', another 'Sounds negative' and another 'Sounds neutral'.
Initially all three topics will contain the same content. However, you can vote up all of the pages that are appropriate for that topic and eventually Topikality's machine learning will figure it out and begin placing the appropriate pages in the correct topic.
That's just one example of what you can do, it's pretty neat.
I can't understand the argument that Twitter replaces RSS feeds. I've seen it mentioned a few times in these comments and Laporte made the same "RSS is dead" statement on a recent episode of This Week in Google.
I see it like this:
Twitter is real-time and interruption-oriented. If you're not paying attention to your stream or the overall trending topics, you're going to get lost in the noise.
RSS feeds + readers, on the other hand, wait for you. My 50+ news sources pile up in Google Reader and I skim through the stories twice a day, flagging what I find interesting.
Two different platforms, two different uses.
I do agree, however, that RSS feeds need to be packaged in a more digestible format for mainstream users.
I recieve google alerts, use lazyfeed, and subscribe to a few tags on delicious through RSS.
While I like how I can find something I never would have found otherwise through google alerts and lazyfeed, it does require me to wade through a lot of crap.
Delicious tag feeds have worked the best for me keeping up on topic information. It filters the crap out better and since I already use delicious to bookmark, it saves me a step.
However, I rely on Google Reader and Twitter to keep up on topics much more heavily than the other 3 options.
As a long-time RSS-addict, I heavily depend on my mixed feeds, what I read in Netvibes, and sometimes Google Reader (after some success, it started to fade out, while the older Netvibes is still my first page to open and last to close). I sort them with AideRSS and mix with Pipes.
I think the most serious problems are:
-Firstly, certainly, the problem of intelligent filtering and finding the interesting items. In the last 5 years only one service (AideRSS) brought a solution to rank RSS-items. But it's not a really personalized service, since it finds the most popular (for others), not the most interesting (for me) items. That's a huge difference.
And We will meet this problem in the future much more frequently, since the fast/real time web depends on intelligent filtering much more heavily.
-The other problem of such services is their built-in slowness. The RSS is not designed to work fast (You have to poll the server, and making it frequently consumes bandwidth), so it's not surprising that filtering services are _really_ slow. Today I got some 1 year old 'news' from a really rarely polled blog. Cool.
-The RSS is "technically upside down". Some people have heard something about RSS, but doesn't know, what it is, an how to exploit it. Manipulating feeds are difficult thing that nobody knows. A 'good' service would be right the opposite: You wouldn't know, what it is, just got the result. Like or dislike items, and the machine would learn. It would show You an item's properties (tags, origin, popularity, etc), that reader would vote for or against. I think RSS represents a geeky way of thinking about news, allowing You to change things under the hood. A better feed service would rather concentrate on the end product and usability.
Posted by: kgyst.myopenid.com
|
January 21, 2010 12:58 PM
Comment to McManus
I agree that topic based RSS feeds systems could work a lot better for users if they were more accurate with the content they provide in terms of the user's interests and preferences. Furthermore, it would be nice if a user didn't have to constantly define his interests to such a system or have to continuously maintain it, as his interests change, evolve or become more specific.
At Genieo, where I work, we're just at the final stages of developing a product which concentrates on these aspects of topic based RSS feeds exactly. In fact we've just released an Alpha version and we welcome anyone to try it and send us some constructive feed backs.
What we set out to do was to create a product which will basically automate the user's input by learning and following on his interests and preferences, and feed this information to a high resolution filtering system which will be used to produce much more accurate topic based RSS feeds connections in reference to the user interests.
More than that, Genieo automatically follows up on the changes in the user's interests, continuously adapting to them and so always keeping relevant in terms of the content it brings, and it also provides the user with options to further refine his requests.
Genieo is a stand alone program which is installed on the user's PC and manages all the information in the privacy of the user's machine, without it being shared anywhere on the web.
If you wish to try Genieo, please leave your email address at www.genieo.com and we’ll send you a download link.
We hope you do give it a try and let us know what you think.
The main issue with topic feeds is that they are based on unstructured topics/tags. The years old "vocabulary problem" (Furnas et. al 1987) haunts that approach, as there is very little chance of different authors sharing the same tags or topic names, let alone readers share them. So unless the topic you're interested in has a very distinct and short vocabulary (like a company name), the load of choosing what to track will have to be taken away from the user and on to some algorithmic/NLP magic, as mentioned for example in the previous comment about Genieo (which I use, and does a decent job on that).