The interest feed
When I subscribe to anybody’s blog there is usually a choice of feeds between ‘posts’ and ‘comments’. Whilst ‘posts’ usually suits me fine I find that it isn’t adequate when I make a comment and want to watch the unfolding discussion. I never choose ‘comments’, even on my favourite blogs, because the noise to signal ratio is too high. The result is that I get thrown back into the Web 1.0 days of having to check a particular URL with a browser every so often. This is a real bore, and so I think I often miss out.
So… I propose a new class of feed – let’s call it the ‘interest’ feed. This gives you the same stuff as ‘posts’, but also lets you see ‘comments’ on any post that’s designated as interesting (e.g. by making a comment to it).
Of course the underlying issue here (once again!) is identity, as such a scheme would imply customised feeds for each individual subscriber (or some sort of personalised identity driven meta feed mashup).
I think this is the sort of thing that the major blogging platforms could start offering – come on guys – it’s not that hard!
Filed under: blogging | 3 Comments
Tags: ATOM, blog, feed, identity, rss
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tag filters. commenting (especially “tag” or “me too”) is intrusive to the discussion and adds noise. tags on the article or any following can be added by the owner or any commenter (a la delicious, slashdot, and many more examples). you should then be able to use specific interest tags to filter your feed. problem solved?
couldn’t you achieve the same with the blog reader doing the filtering — probably scales much better, it just needs to track which feeds need a comment feed tracked too. is there something in the meta for a feed (in the auto discovery stuff) which says *this* is the comment feed for a post you’ve flagged?
I gave this some more thought last night, and I’m inclined towards tagging – it seems like a suitably web 2.0 approach. Of course if we have some way of aligning the tags with identity then that helps a lot. There’s also the question of where the tag cloud lives. It could be on the client as Ken suggests, but my inclination is for it to be a service.