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March 28, 2006

The Future of RSS

Thanks to the great Feedburner service, I've now incorporated my Flickr RSS feed into the Tedlog feed. That means that those of you who read this blog in an RSS aggregator will now get all the new Flickr photos as they're posted, as well. My hope is that this creates an RSS analogue to the design of the website, which runs a selection of photos along the right-hand column.

RSS is a tricky medium - full of promise, but also full of new design challenges. The concept of news aggregation is really smart and forward-thinking. It replaces the paradigm of the static bookmark with the paradigm of the continuously updated feed.

I think Apple's Safari 2.0 does the best job of turning RSS feeds into useful information. A bookmark menu runs along the top, just below the toolbar. After each menu item is a number in parentheses. That's how many new blog entries have been posted since the last time the feed was opened. So, at a glance, you can see which of your top blogs have new content, and which don't. You eliminate the annoyance of visiting a favorite site only to discover that nothing new has been posted since the last time you checked. And you can do it all from right inside your web browser, without having to run a separate program.

But I still have problems with how RSS is visually implemented. In Safari, if I decide I want to read a specific blog entry, I usually click straight through from the page that displays the RSS feed, to the website itself.

The problem is that in any RSS reader, the original visual context of a blog entry is effaced, replaced by the formatting options of a range of different aggregators. The challenge is to find ways to exploit the developing Atom feed language (Atom is the HTML of RSS, more or less) to put design back into blogs. This Feedburner service combining blog feeds with Flickr feeds is a great example of how to answer this challenge by leveraging the power of RSS technology. A web page is one single, indivisible thing. But an RSS feed is a collection of many discrete items. So they can be juggled and recombined in an array of ways.

If RSS is really going to reach its potential, it can't just be about content, but also form. There has to be room for bloggers to shape the visual style of their self-representations. The web isn't just about words. After all, it was Mosaic, the first graphical browser, which finally turned the internet into a mass medium. RSS is still waiting for its Mosaic.

Posted by tedf at March 28, 2006 07:03 PM

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