Re: XML-RPC and the Need to Cash In

["Mark Paschal" <markpasc@mindspring.com>]

Morbus Iff wrote:
> Well, the problem with browser based systems like Radio Userland
> and AmphetaDesk is that you can't determine what someone has read,
> unless tell you, like in Radio Userland (by clicking that little
> checkbox).

Equating "displayed in the browser" with "read" would be good enough
for some uses--admittedly, reducing redundancy isn't one of them. If
I've seen a bare link to a given article, I might not be interested
until I see a more intriguing description from J Random's weblog. If I
did read the article, I might still be interested in a Metafilter
discussion it spawned.

Since finding what someone's read is not only hard but not necessarily
a good indicator of what's safe to ignore, what about not depending on
what's been read to reduce redundancy? One way would be to present
"similar items" (however defined) as a single group, in something like
a "top news" section. That would make it harder to find all the
Metafilter discussions to see if there's one on Today's Hot Story Y,
but if you're really looking for a particular Metafilter discussion,
your headline aggregator is a worse tool in all respects than
metafilter.com.

If one can't eliminate the similar items from view, one could at least
put them in the same place so they can be more easily ignored.


Mark Paschal
markpasc@mindspring.com