Thursday, July 03, 2014

Do You Use RSS?

I think that RSS is one of the things that contributes to the slim pickings here on the TANBI site.  My subscriptions accumulate at a rate of about 800 articles a day.  Really it has gotten a little out of control.  These days most of the time I just click through the que looking for things for the greenpage.  I used to use Google Reader, and when they killed that off I switched to Feedly.

Reader had this feature that I really miss with Feedly.  On the older platform a user created an additional feed with their tags.  That way I could have a tag #Greenpage and there would be an address I could share with others and they would see everything I tagged - even if I didn't eventually publish it on the other page.  I probably identify more that double the articles I actually use.  It'd be nice to be able to point people to the full list should they have an interest.

Recently I've found myself wanting a feature that neither the old or the new platform delivers.  I would really like to have an expert system crawl everything currently unread and group articles with common content.  I subscribe to many feeds with overlapping content.  I guess I could just pick one and delete all the like feeds, but I feel like I would miss content that way.  But it would be useful if the app would automatically boggle the stories down so that I only saw what was unique from each site.  That way if I were interested in a particular story all the coverage would be in one place.  Even better, when I'm not interested I could dismiss all the common articles at one time.

I'm fairly sure the analytics for this aren't too complicated.  Many of the search engines turn up news stories this way on their results page.  I wonder how hard it would be to apply the same idea to an RSS account.

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