Breyten² ([info]breyten) wrote,
@ 2004-09-03 15:17:00
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Current mood: contemplative

Feed splicing considered harmful
With the introduction of FeedBurner's Link Splicer, splicing (RSS/Atom) feeds has increased in popularity. Jon Udell is totally right when he says that


Although this feed splicing stuff is interesting, there are can be subtle consequences. For example, a link appearing in a linkblog (such as a del.icio.us feed) tends to represent a smaller investment of thought and effort than a link appearing in a "regular" blog. If the two sources of links remain distinct, I can choose to regard them separately or, at my discretion, merge them. If they're blended at the source, though, it may or may not be possible to recover that distinction.

It's exactly the reason why I didn't decide to post my del.icio.us links here and why I'm not happy with Keith abandoning his del.icio.us account, and merging his weblog and his linklog. Although he's happy about the seamless integration between the two, the result is that the signal/noise ratio for his feed has significantly increased, because it's impossible to tell the difference between a link and a post (I also have to say that del.icio.us made it possible to entirely ignore the links he tagged as 'politics', thereby reducing the S/N ratio as well). Ultimately, posts are much more important than links. Unfortunately, the feed readers currently around all suck, and they are not helping me making the distinction between posts and links either. Until we have better readers to deal with these kind of problems, I suggest you stop splicing your feeds, or at least offer your readers a choice.

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[info]keith83
2004-09-03 07:34 pm UTC (link)
Thanks for the comments. I've been wanting some feedback actually. For reference, here are the four ways I've done my linkblog.

First, I did it manually by collecting a bunch of links I wanted to keep track of and then spending a long time posting them all in one huge post. I'd often collect them for days, so it wouldn't be timely. In addition, doing it that way, whenever I created a link post like that I often added new links right onto it rather than making a new post, so I got comments from people using RSS aggregators who complained that the same post kept coming up and it was annoying them. Plus, then there was no way to comment on or link to a particular link, and the pain of it all discouraged me from doing it this way so I wound up not posting links.

Then I tried using del.icio.us and syndicating the del.icio.us links into posts on my site, but that was a mess for a whole bunch of reasons: it was ugly, del.icio.us' API didn't let me easily get just the links I wanted, del.icio.us didn't let me put more than 255 characters in the link description, and I still wound up with big posts where you couldn't comment on or link to a particular link. Plus, with both of these "big posts with lots of links" styles, I'd found that because they would hit so many different topics, when I'd do searches for things on my weblog those big link posts would come up *very* often for all different kinds of searches.

Then since that all sucked I just syndicated my del.icio.us links in the right nav of my site, but I didn't like having the links separate from my main blog because you don't really see it over there, it's not searchable from within my site, it's not *archived* anywhere except del.icio.us (and I don't like to depend on external services for things if possible), I still had the limitations of del.icio.us, and there was no way to comment on or link to a particular link syndicated from del.icio.us. I also didn't like the public nature of del.icio.us. I was just using it as a tool for myself, but I got comments from people calling me a "right wing troll" that I didn't need.

So, now I've taken a cue from Matt and Kottke and integrated the links with my main site and it solves pretty much all those problems. You mention that posts are more important than links, but fairly often I take what was once just a link post and expand it into a "real" post. It seems like your main issues are that you can't filter out politics links and that you don't like link-posts showing up together with normal posts in your RSS aggregator, right?

As for the aggregator, I think there's a way to specify the categories of a post in the RSS feed which at least some aggregators support. If your aggregator supports that, might that help you filter out posts in the 'linkblog' or 'politics' categories?

As for filtering out politics links, *someday* I'm going to enable del.icio.us-like tags to do categorization on my weblog. I'm already very far along with something sort of like del.icio.us that I just use myself. When that's done I should be able to integrate that tag scheme with my weblog and provide a query language so you can include or exclude certain tags from a feed.

Wow, this is a long comment. Anyway, if there's any other feedback you can offer please do.

P.S. It's fascinating how many words I used that are real words but aren't in the spellchecker. That's not to say the spellchecker is bad, but rather that English changes very rapidly. Words that weren't in the spellchecker were linkblog, RSS, aggregators/aggregator, API, weblog, nav, blog, searchable, and Kottke (can't be expected because it's a proper name). Ha, and now spellchecker :)

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