BarCampBlock : BarCampBlockSessionNotes

"What should I read?" Coping with RSS glut.

These are my (Jon Goldberg's) notes. Please add anything I missed!

• Introductions. We said who we are, how many feeds we read and how many articles we read. There's a big range, but many in the room have 100 or more feed items a day. Self-selecting population based on the title of the session. :)
• Jon talked about illumio's solution to this problem. Subscribe to as many feeds as you want, way more than you have now. Let the software identify the small subset in which you'll be interested. He subscribes to about 200 feeds right now but only matches 50 items a day which is manageable. illumio maintains a dynamic index of your interests, completely privacy-protected and living on your desktop. You can give the product guidance to say that you want more or fewer matches and about specific topics of interest. But this isn't necessary. illumio also lets you connect with other users who are interested in the same topics, but again only through a privacy-protecting handshake where you both want to connect with each other.
• Issue with feeds today: "why can't my feed aggregator only show me an article once? I get a lot of duplicates." This seems like an issue with feeds generated from google alerts. Google sends you the same web page many times, even over the course of months.
• Discussion about privacy: "do users really care?" Good question. Seems like early adopters care, but internet users' privacy focus may have lessened until recently. The recent backlash against Google's privacy policies may indicate this is becoming really important to users again? Someone brought up the Mary Jo Foley line along the lines of "whenever you here that google is doing something, replace the name google with microsoft and see how that makes you feel"
• Feed reader feature idea: when I first subscribe to a feed, I'd like it to be in a trial state. The reader would remind me after a few weeks or a month that it is new and ask me if it makes the cut or should be deleted.
• Feed reader feature idea: based on analysis of how long I read each article, where I focus when scrolling, etc., can the reader do a good job of knowing which new articles I'm most likely to want to read? illumio asks for explicit feedback from the user (give me "more like this" or "less like this"). But could it be totally inferred?
• Feed reader feature idea: can my feed items (or feeds) be prioritized by my social network?
• Discussion: is RSS push or pull? Technically it is pull, but at this point all readers should be periodically pulling behind the scenes so the user experience is that new content is pushed out as it is generated. Just like email.
• Discussion about archetypes. Some people want to read everything from some number of sources. The author of the blog is the filter. Others consume a small subset of information from very prolific sources and need to have that information filtered. Should we even be talking about one product that is appropriate for all these people? Jon claimed that almost everyone is really a hybrid. Jon's example: I want to read everything that Bruce Schneier has to say. But I only want to read the small subset of SANS NewsBites articles that match my interests. I want a single feed reader that can handle both styles so I set up illumio to notify me every time an article comes from the Schneier blog but use dynamic filtering for most others.