BeigeJournal

This Lockergnome article alerted me to this by Joshua Allen about making RSS more RSS-beginner friendly.

I was seeing those RSS buttons all over, and even had a blog that (by default, essentially) provided an RSS feed, for quite some time before figuring out why I’d want to use RSS. I’d even installed a few RSS readers (some Firefox plugins), but couldn’t see what they were useful for.

My user experience, without the aggregator, was to select the bookmark for the site, and then read it. With the aggregator, first, of course, I had to install the thing and figure out how to do anything with it. Then add RSS URLs. Then I could click on the site name and see it in plain text, sometimes just the summaries/excerpts/the first n bytes. Hmmm, why was I doing this?

More recently I tried Bloglines, and I finally understand. Bloglines has feed auto discovery, so I can just paste in the main URL and not have to find the feed URL manually. Bloglines does a nice job of displaying the feed. Most of all, bloglines is really, really good at letting me know which sites have been updated since I last looked, and how many new entries each has. This is what the aggregator is useful for. I agree with Nathan Wallace’s comment on Roy Osherove’s thoughts on the RSS user experience that aggregators are most useful for infrequently updated sites. I don’t need fancy software to know if Boing Boing has been updated. It gets updated roughly continuously. What this is really useful for are sites that get updated a few times a month. You don’t want to check them manually every day, but you don’t want to forget all about them, either. Better to have software alert you to updates.

From a new-to-feed-aggregators, not-sure-why-I’d-want-one user’s perspective, the fact that Bloglines informs the user of updated sites automatically, without the user having to do anything, is important. I had spent some time installing and fooling around with aggregators before without ever realizing that that was nearly the whole reason for using them.

Bloglines, as a web-based service, also has the advantage of solving, rather than creating, synchronization issues if you use more than one computer, and being usable from any computer with a web browser and Internet access without software installation. I have found this more useful than I had thought it would be. I wouldn’t want to use anything that doesn’t make it easy to keep several computers synchronized.