When I visit a site that I find feed-worthy, I usually find I have only one, or a few, of their interests in common. I’m usually looking for industry related information, yet these same feeds mix personal or journal style posts right in with the items I’m interested in. So, as Dave from Mezzoblue pointed out,
“when new items show up in my newsreader from people I enjoy reading, I’m often mildly disappointed when it’s simply a new camera phone image, or a couple of sparsely-described links to stuff I’ve already seen.”
What if I don’t want it all? Enter the need for customized feed subscriptions.
Personal RSS Subscriptions
I think there needs to be a shift in the major blog software to create custom RSS feeds based on the readers’ criteria. Most all blogging software has the ability of placing posts into one or more categories. Some software probably is using meta tagging to further describe the post (if they don’t…they should). If the ability to distinguish a posts’ topic from another, why do we get everything blended together in one single feed?
The Solution
We as readers should be able to visit a subscription page. In it we should be able to mark off each category, or select tags, for the type of posts we want to subscribe to. The page should give you a custom feed link with an ID in it. The ID is what tells the RSS feed provider what your stored preferences are each time you request an update. The subscription page should also allow you to return and modify your subscription at any time, allowing you to update or change your needs in the future.
This feature should also allow you to make multiple customized feeds. This way as readers, we can subscribe to the industry related information, as well as a feed of the authors personal journal entries or link lists. We can keep them separate, which would allow us to better organize our feeds within our feed readers.
One step beyond
If this feature was commonplace, our feed readers could allow us to combine multiple feeds from one category into one logical feed. (perhaps some software already does this.) Then we can combine all our industry feeds into one large group, constantly keeping up to date by topic rather than by author. I’ve heard talk about extending the RSS tags to allow a way of categorizing the posts. This could work, but considering the state of RSS and all of it’s flavors, this seems like a much more difficult change. A change to how things are subscribed to can be done now, and as readers we could begin to organize our feeds right away.
My original idea was to implement this for my site, however I don’t have nearly the amount of content to make it worthwhile. The recent chatter about this sort of issue prompted me to pitch in, and hopefully the blogging software out there will start to incorporate these kinds of features.
Published on February 20, 2005
Resides in Information Architecture, User Experience
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2 Responses to “Personalized RSS Subscriptions”
1
Ryan on October 22nd, 2005
Shaun Inman has a customizable RSS feed on his site. You can select which categories you would like to inlude in the feed as well as comments if you’d like. It’s done very well.
http://shauninman.com/feed/
2
Scott Reynen on January 12th, 2006
You might be interested in this:
http://weblog.randomchaos.com/rssfilter/
It allows you to filter feeds down to only what you want. It’s far from perfect, but it is open source.