Re: [syndication] An Open Letter of Mindless Blathering

[Morbus Iff <morbus@disobey.com>]

>1. Make it easy for your users to publish their subscription lists.
>We're off to an excellent start with this with Radio. The hotlist and
>mySubscriptions.opml, being available publicly for all upstreaming-enabled

So when will you allows to zap they're lists to ourfavoritesongs.com? I'd 
love to do something like that on my end, but it gets back to the "I can do 
it, but can I *support* it forever?" problem. We talked of this briefly on 
another list - the AmphetaDesk subscription list is OPML and nigh-near 
exactly like mySubscriptions.opml (by intentional design). What needs to be 
done (server-side, monetary-wise, "do it once every week ONLY", etc.) to 
allow third party participation?

>Add to that Jeff's work on the Newsfeeds blog, and we're starting to get
>somewhere. It's just like movies, music and sports. You need stats, and you

Yes, true, but if that's was 100% of the case, then epinions.com would 
never have grown as popular as it has. Sure, I could trust Friend B's 
opinion about a movie, but if I knew that the last movie he chose was a 
stinker, I'll poke around on the 'net (I don't have a lot of friends <g>) 
to see what other people have said.

In some cases, I rarely find magazines or sites or other people who share 
my same opinions on movies. I'm a big b-movie horror fan with a love toward 
classic monster movies instead of the stuff nowadays (think Elvira and 
Ghoulardi vs. Troma and Charles Band) . RSS won't help me there, cos there 
ain't any matching channels. With 2500+ RSS channels out there, it's only 
going to get worse, even if there WAS one or two, I'm gonna be hardpressed 
to find a user also subscribing to that channel, which makes popularity 
ranking work only for mass-media subjects.

If I wanted to find stuff like the above, I run to google.com, type it in, 
and I'll find something. In my case, that justifies a need for a global 
directory (as well as a popularity meter).


Morbus Iff
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http://www.disobey.com/
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