Alright folks . . . this time you really do have the potential for information overload

This entry was posted on Monday, May 31st, 2004 at 9:17 PM and is filed under Stuff on this site.

So, I’ve continued to hack at FeedOnFeeds and it now does my bidding as I see fit.

It keeps a log - of everything I do.

It keeps track of the last time I view a blog.

It orders everything chronologically.

You’re wondering why?

Simple - I don’t want to have to maintain a BlogRoll. I want my news reader to do that for me. That was why I created the (definitely now to be considered obsolete) BlogRollUpdater.

I don’t want to have to manage my subscriptions. I want my news reader to do that for me.

When I come across a nifty site, I want to click on a “nifty site” button. Then, I get a list of recent “nifty site” places in my news reader. I click. I read. It notices.

If there’s a nifty site that I don’t click on enough, it scrolls out of view. Must not have been that nifty.

There’s lots of data that could be mined out of this - for example, I could determine if there are certain keywords in titles that are more likely to encourage me to read those posts or not.

There’s lots of data that could be shared. Sure, I could provide you all with the most recent 10, 100, or sites with feeds (did I mention there’s RSS auto-detection in the “nifty site” button too?), that I’ve visited.

But that’s just the beginning.

I could provide you with a complete list of all the permalinks of all the items that I’ve read in the past _ and the exact times that I clicked on their titles.

Sure, it helps me - I click “nifty button” and then forget….

But how can/should it help you? What sort of data would you, my readers, like to see?

I can now easily generate a link log of all those news reader read items and have it be more than 100 entries long - what should I cut it off at? Just links not associated with a feed? Just today? Just the last 12? Should I provide views for people to look back?

So yeah folks - let me know what you want, and if this sounds like a nifty idea or not.

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Richard MacManus Says:
May 31st, 2004 at 10:20 PM

I’m not sure I follow you… are you saying you’ll list all the items you’ve read and clicked “Nifty” for in your RSS?? Seems a bit extreme if it’ll be 100 items per day. I don’t mind you putting all your content in one feed, although maybe I would mind if it was 100 updates per day.

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Andrew Chen Says:
May 31st, 2004 at 10:36 PM

I don’t think you grasp exactly what I’m talking about.

Imagine publishing your browser history as an RSS feed ….

That’s the sort of thing that I’m talking about. Probably too much data.

Now imagine mining your browser history for sites with RSS feeds most (recently) visited -

that’s what I’m hoping to eventually go for.

The question being, how to mine the data into something useful - and what would make it useful - it is useful enough to me but what would make it useful to you?

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Andrew Chen Says:
May 31st, 2004 at 10:48 PM

No, not everything I’ve clicked “nifty” for …. Everything I’ve read. Every time I read something. Every time I refresh a feed. Every time I subscribe to a feed. Feeds won’t auto-refresh because I won’t delete feeds just like I don’t delete old posts on my blog.

I was thinking of calling it a BlogBlog because that is kind of what it would be - maybe an RSS blog - but not quite like that, because there’s the history of every item that I’ve read. Just plain read. No clicking “nifty” - that only happens for things outside the news reader - for things inside, everything gets recorded.

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AndrewSW: Blog Says:
June 8th, 2004 at 11:21 PM

You wanted a BlogRoll - you got it - kind of
As mentioned previously, I’ve been looking at trying to find a way to not have to maintain a BlogRoll. I’d like to think I’ve found it. You can see it on my side bar now.

Basically, for every RSS feed item that I view, as well as some other thing…

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AndrewSW: Blog Says:
July 9th, 2004 at 3:48 PM

Andrew’s Feed Reader and Auto-Blogroll
So, here it is, my really hacked up version of feedonfeeds. I am calling it afraabr which stands for “Andrew’s Feed Reader and Auto-Blogroll”.

I’m going to put the contents of the readme file right here, so you call can peruse it as you see fit:…

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