[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

RSS aggregators are going in the wrong direction. Here's the problem. A good number of my friends use LiveJournal, as do I, mostly to read their journals at this point. One of the coolest things about LJ is the friends list concept, which allows you to interleave the journals of everyone you've marked as a friend. Good stuff. Certainly you can do that with the various desktop RSS aggregators.

Only for yourself! What if Trip decides he wants to use an aggregator, and moves his daily reading link list over there? Suddenly I don't have access to that corner of his brain; I can't see what he finds interesting. This is a lose. It reduces the information flow, and involuntary information flow reduction is just wrong.

There are a couple of Web-oriented RSS aggregators. Amphetadesk is cool but it is not oriented towards people who want to share their aggregations. Peerkat is cool but it is not an active project as far as I can tell. Ditto blagg, plus blagg doesn't do RSS 1.0. There's an RSS plugin for Movable Type (not to mention a decent RSS perl module) but now we're moving away from the grail of easy configurability.

Actually, the closest thing to what I want is LiveJournal, come to think of it, now that they've allowed people to add RSS feeds to their friends lists. You're kind of stuck if you want to read a feed that hasn't been added to LJ yet, though, since you need a new account code to add such a feed. I'm installing Peerkat to see if that suits my needs; however, an end user shouldn't have to dick around with installing Python and so on.

(Sidenote: Dave Winer's aggregator list arrogantly excludes aggregators that don't read RSS 2.0. Geeze, at least include a subcategory for 'em or something.)

Comments

[etherlad.livejournal.com]

I didn't need to use any of my account codes up to get my wolfspoor feed up and running.

Go over to www.livejournal.com/syn (http://www.livejournal.com/syn). It looks like feeds are "paid for" in a different way, by taking a number of points, or fraction thereof, from whomever subscribes. At least, that's the way I understand it.

What I like about LJ is that not only does it support feeds-as-friends, but my friends list itself is an RSS feed (http://www.livejournal.com/customview.cgi?user=etherlad&styleid=171793). (:

[bryant]

Ah! Either that's changed or I was clumsy when I made popone. Not sure which. Cool, though.

I didn't know that style trick either. That's really rather useful. Back to plotting.

[etherlad.livejournal.com]

Probably changed it when they realized they had a popular thing on their hands.

Yeah, I find the friends list thing extremely handy. And of course, there's straight-out www.livejournal.com/users/your_username_here/rss (http://www.livejournal.com/users/etherlad/rss) to just get your own journal as a feed.

[merlinofchaos]

The main problem with LJ and RSS is that one of the things I enjoy about LJ, the private/locked posts, goes completely away without the LJ logins.