Perthblogs: out of hand, what about the future?
It has happened — as Mark pointed out:
Perthblogs has turned from a peaceful little community page into a freaking torrent of text that I can no longer read in its entirety.
I’m feeling the same way. Just too much material in the perth blog feed now. So, the community that we are aggregating has gone beyond some point where there is just too much stuff to read, too many lives to keep up with. And for me, that feels like a really scratchy radio signal. Can’t find the signal above the noise.
So.. what are we going to do about it? I’ve suggested I’ll automate the subscription process, but that will just add more blogs more often, which means the feed will get even less readable.
I’m looking for ideas: given we are going to automate something, shall we have multiple feeds, with different focusses? Or allow people to make their own custom feeds and share them with others? Or what? I need your thoughts on what we are going to do. Comments would be welcome here - then I’ll summarise the ideas into the wiki and we can work on the design of this thing togther. Start with comments here, though, or blog about it with trackbacks.
Looking forward to your ideas… What do we want the perth blogs feeds to be? How do they currently work for you? What could make it better?
My biggest problem with the feed, and perhaps its just my reader, but I get a lot of entries being doubled up. It does make sorting through a bit tedious at times.
I think if you want to split the wiki up two categories would be fine. One for personal blogs, like mine, and another for more informational blogs like Gadget Lounge.
Either way you go it would be a shame to see the main feed go down. It’s the link that keeps us altogether.
I say we keep the main feed, for those information junkies, but also split the feeds. Like David says, maybe we have different categories. How about Personal, Tech, Political, Australiana, Current Affairs, Writing? Any others. Perhaps we just copy a book shop, as it seems they have the main information categories covered. Maybe we have a vote, select the categories, and then it is up to the individual to flag there blog for the relevant feeds. Some could sit in multiple of course.
What about posting only the title of the blog, the name of the author, a twenty-word excerpt and a time-stamp?
It would make it a lot easier to sift through.
Yeah as with Robert. I have fairly eclectic tastes and like them all together but a word limit would help keep things from being hogged. Long posts tend to dominate. It would also encourage snappier openers…
Maybe you don’t care about the difference between sour cream and creme fraiche but if one can kill and the
Oh also double posts bad too. I’m very guilty of this as I often pop back to edit for typos.
I enjoy the variety of having everything there. I usually scroll down and read the titles and first couple of lines of most posts. I don’t read the full text of everything posted, only those that interest me enough to keep reading.
If there was only the first twenty or so words as has been suggested it would make it simpler and easier to find posts that we wanted to read in more detail.
I don’t get it. You mean you people go to the web page and all the posts there, is that what people are saying? It’s much easier if you get an RSS feed of the whole collection, and that way you can filter based on subject. I can scan Perth Blogs in seconds and determine which I want to read in more detail from the comfort of NetNewsWire. If I want more info I can go to the author’s blog.
I use an RSS Reader as well, which is the best way of doing it. I used SharpReader in the past, but am now on SauceReader. The only problem I have with the feed is that some sites (generally Blogger ones) don’t work. The URL gets mangled somewhere along the way.
I don’t use an RSS reader, because I don’t like the interface.
But changing the display on the web feed won’t necessarily alter the RSS feeds people can subscribe to on their feed-reader. We should cater to as many users as possible.
*Wonders how many of these options are feasible.*
For my two cents, I’d prefer full text in the feed. Extracts just don’t work for me because I don’t look at the subject matter before deciding to read something.
I think categories would solve the overload problem for the moment, but I can still see certain categories (’personal’, for example) becoming overloaded in the future. Arbitrary categories based on geography or groups of people who read each other’s blogs would be a good backup in that case. Imagine the kind of layout you get in chat rooms, where the people in the Buffy room aren’t necessarily talking about Buffy The Vampire Slayer, just having a private convo. Even if you create a reasonably random structure, people will still find niches in it.
Of course, if we could build customised feeds and use Graham’s server as our own personal RSS reader, that would be even better. I *hate* my reader.
I don’t see the point of only headers and links, there just not enough information to get from it for me to click on the link and read it. Its more an update service then anything. I’m guilty of using abbreviated posts in my rss feed, but I still give the reader a chace to work out what I’m saying. I use my reader as a guide, if I like something enough I’ll actually go to the site and read it.
Categories are best for me. A main complete feed is a must though.
But of course if we all have our own feeds then at the end of the day users just need only add each of our sites separately.
Thanks for all the comments. Some good stuff going on here. I’ll digest it all on the weekend and look at some possibilities. Keep going. I like the sound of categories too. Think that could be good, especially if they were easy to create and join.
Title and a 25 word abstract is surely enough. I use the feed regularly, but when I see a long posting I tend to skip it after the first paragraph and click through to the relevant blog. Seeing the whole thing on someone’s blog is far better because their words fit in with the blog’s design.
I’m still not convinced. Again, it would be best if we could run two feeds so both options exist.
There’s no problem with provding a few different kinds of feeds. I’m pretty sure we can bend planet to make that work.
So, to summarise briefly:
1. we need a feed of blog summaries (25 words…) as well as a full text feed. People can then choose which one they like.
2. some kind of category-based feeds would be good, especially if people could make new feeds and share them with others.
So I propose doing (1) first, then start slowly working on (2).