Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS
To follow-up on my rather bold prediction for RSS in my previous post: "in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people."
One of the reasons I think this may eventuate is that blogging is and always will be a minority sport (as I've referred to it in the past). The killer app for RSS probably won't be geared towards the current ranks of bloggers and geeks. When RSS hits it big, it'll be because 'normal' people start using it - your Mom and Dad, Frank from Marketing, Jessie from Payroll, Dave from the local dairy. They won't be bloggers. They won't be interested in writing or podcasting or anything like that. All they'll want to do is track news and trends that are relevant to them.
Tools will evolve to let people easily set-up personalized searches for information relevant to them and subscribe to the results - using, you guessed it, RSS! Google will probably be the front-runner (see this video for a hint to the future - thanks twdanny for the reminder), PubSub will be another, current players like Bloglines and Technorati will be in amongst it, and who knows who else.
But don't get me wrong, conversations and people will still be important. It's just that if 'normal' people won't be bloggers (one of my assumptions), then the community aspects of the blogosphere won't be so important to them. This doesn't mean they won't subscribe to people - normal folk will find niche writers and podcasters and so on and subscribe to them. But it'll be far more convenient and useful for a lot of people to subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds and trust the tools to filter the right information through to them, including content from niche bloggers.
On this theme, David Smith from Preoccupations wrote a post about the Google "nofollow" meme, which led him to comment:
"Whatever this does for spam, it's certainly got me thinking that the web is
heading towards greater separateness, a position reinforced when I read (thanks,
Ian!) that 'in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix
feeds than feeds of actual people' (Read/Write Web). Well, I'd rather seek out the
conversations, thank you, and leave the computer puttering away in the background,
dribbling a modest number of topic/tag feeds whose purpose will be severely subordinated
to the primary thing that matters to me in my life, the relationships I have with other
people."
(emphasis mine)
I replied in David's blog that I didn't mean to imply that conversations or people are unimportant. On the contrary, 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. Separateness is less of an issue with topic/tag/remix feeds, than it is without them. Topic/tag/remix feeds are more inclusive for all types of people (see this oldie but a goodie for more on this).
Summary
In 2005 in the blogosphere, RSS is a community-enabler. You find someone you like and you subscribe to them, and conversations ensue. What I'm suggesting is that in the future RSS will still be a community enabler, but by far its biggest use will be as a means to subscribe to personalised news and other information important to the lives of non-blogging people. Examples of the information I'm talking about: stocks, bank statements, weather, information needed for one's job, sports news, niche information (the long tail), lots of other things we can't predict yet ;-)
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Kind off the topic.
but since you mentioned it in the summary ;)
I believe the hardest thing with building the community of bloggers is actually to find bloggers with the same interests as yours. As of now, the best way (or possibly the only way) to do this is to follow the comments or tracbacks of other bloggers around different blogs, and visit their blogs and to see if there's anything interesing they're saying, or to go through the entire blogroll or OPML of someone else and then, again seeing that blog is interesting. This could easily make everything come under the "power law" as you start seeing the same names over and over again. You'll mostly likely simply subscribe to the feed even without really knowing what it's about.
I don't see any difference between finding the right blogs, or bloggers, and what we had to do with goods and products 10 years ago when Amazon came out for the first time. What makes online purchasing so much easier on amazon now? It's the recommendations and reviews on that particular product. I believe the same should be done on each rss feed. For example, go to bloglines and search for "web 2.0" and get the rss feed. Which ones are you going to subscribe to? You read every one of them and find what satisifies you most. Instead, what if you can just read reviews and see the average "score" of feed. and what if, if AI allows, the recommendations! This could still be subject to power law, but at least you get a chance to see what it's about by reading reviews before subscring.
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Just in case you haven't seen, over on Many to Many Liz Lawley and Clay Shirkey have some interesting views relating to this. I particularly like the analogy of the kayak.
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I tend to agree. I have recently picked up on remixing tags/topics/keywords as you say at feedster and then subscribing to that feed with bloglines. I find a lot of benefit in re-using these queries as RSS feeds.