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Pete finally realizes that blogs can form a basis for personalized web search. In other news from Pete, Gmail is adding an aggregator, Feedmesh still seems like a good idea that is only alive thanks to Bob Wyman, and AllConsuming is tagging for books.

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Bloglines has a pretty mild level of lock-in, it's true. Thanks to export OPML, it's fairly easy to take your data to another aggregator. Even this hassle, however, is not negligible. If Bloglines has cornered the market for people seeking a simple, easy-to-access, no-installation-required aggregator, many of their customers might indeed not care to figure out what OPML means. Additionally, they have the usual lock-in that results from users being accustomed to a certain interface.

Also, as Mary points out, the historical archive of blog posts that Bloglines has is pretty valuable. I would say especially so for a search engine.

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Ted Gilchrist makes podcasts using synthesized robot voices. It's… well… interesting.

See also RS3, a tool that combines RSS aggregation, automatic text summarization, and speech synthesis.

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Including a link to API documentation.

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While reading a somewhat interesting post about how the Google Desktop Search works, I saw a very curt comment:

Why not replace Google Desktop with Intellij Omea

Why not? Well, Google Desktop search was from Google, and Omea was… not a word. What is this strange beast?

Omea is an extremely powerful yet simple to use Integrated Information Environment. With Omea, you can access, organize, and quickly search all your digital resources, including e-mails, syndicated Web feeds, instant messaging conversations, newsgroup articles, favorite web sites, personal contacts, and even locally stored files (.doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.), all in one easy to use composite interface that's well organized and efficient to navigate.

Sounds nice, but I've heard this all before. So I download it, and it impresses the hell out of me. As in, it's my new email client and RSS aggregator. It's fast. It's got a complex but usable interface. It synchronizes instantaneously with Outlook.

Let me be blunt: this software raises the bar for frassle. Try it! They also have a simpler RSS Reader and bookmark manager that anyone using an aggregator should try. Windows only.

There are two conflicting designs for RSS aggregators. On one hand are email-style three-pane readers, typically found in desktop aggregators such as SharpReader, RSS Bandit, and others. On the other hand are blended-feeds aggregators, like Userland's Manila and Radio, which take the latest news from all of your subscriptions and blend it into one big time-sorted page.

Dave Winer strongly advocates for the blended-feeds style. When I first heard him rant about this, in person at a Berkman Thursday meeting, I didn't know why he cared so much. I had used both styles of aggregators, and I thought the difference was really just an issue of taste.

That was when I had a small number of subscriptions, around 30 or 50. Now that I have over 200, there is a major difference. In a three-pane aggregator, when you can't read all the news, you skip feeds that aren't often of interest. In a blended-feeds aggregator, you skip postings that are older, or have boring-sounding titles and no pictures.

While the latter seems like a more arbitrary way to prioritize your reading, it actually has some advantages. If you have a big set of feeds that you kinda-sorta read, but aren't devoted to tracking every last post, it works better. With a three-pane aggregator, there is some point where you just give up on a feed—it gathers messages for months, but you can't remember what the hell it is, so you never click it. After a while you can't remember what it's there for and the 312 unread posts makes skimming it too intimidating. Unless you regularly schedule time to organize your subscription list, it just sits there. (Maybe we need a way for computers to emit smells, so you can actually notice it rotting?)

On the contrary, with a blended-feeds aggregator, you'll occassionally see a message from that feed. Either you'll like it and keep the feed, or you'll realize what crap it is and unsubscribe altogether. You're less likely to maintain a meaningless subscription. And the subscriptions you do maintain will all be given a fair shot: your existing preferences for a certain core set of feeds don't preclude everything else to the dustbin.

There's a reason this advantage isn't evident to new aggregator users: it depends on a particular memory threshold. For a while, it's easy to (implicitly) rank a bunch of feeds in your head. Some you check every time they go bold, and that's great, because you never miss or wait for news from the sources you care about. Others you check at specific times, like the comics I read every morning. Others you might save for when a certain topic crosses your mind, or simply for when you're bored.

Up to a certain number of feeds, your mind is capable of telling you when to read what with pretty good accuracy. But at a certain point, the accuracy starts falling off. It becomes risky to subscribe to a new feed because either (1) you will love it and it might push off something else you care about, or (2) you'll not love it enough at first and it will fade into the abyss. But what if it starts to be interesting again? You're not giving it even partial continuous attention, so you miss it.

That's right: in an aggregator that seems designed to help you read every post, you actually miss all sorts of interesting posts. In one that seems to make it difficult to ensure you've read all you care about, you're relieved of caring—and in the process, you're more flexible and open to exploring.

Nonetheless, both approaches have their advantages. Thus the problem is that you're forced to pick one or the other for your whole aggregator. No fair! I have feeds from friends, colleagues I respect, serial publications I want to follow every bit of. I also have feeds from a gazillion social software nerds where I often want an update but can't possibly follow everything.

So my aggregator should let me put the most important feeds on watch lists. It should make sure I've read every post on my watched feeds. And it should let me quickly skim everything else in the more flexible, more efficient blended-feeds format.

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Due to some technical problems, I have stopped automatic feed updates. I now run the feed updates about once a day so I can keep an eye on how they go. Obviously, this makes the aggreagator a lot less useful. I'm sorry about that.

Although I hate to make my users wait, I can promise relief from this in the near future. Frassle alpha 8 is coming this weekend, with a totally redesigned aggregator. That means frontend and backend. It will sport a whole new interface, similar to Bloglines but a bit simpler, and support new features such as OPML import and feed autodiscovery. Though the interface will be more powerful, it will also show up in your browser much faster than the current one thanks to optimized database queries. The backend will be smart enough to find an RSS feed on most blogs that actually have one, and scalable enough to keep a few thousand feeds updated.

Here's a picture of the new aggregator interface. Click to enlarge:

Thanks for your patience as I hammer out this new version.

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A great list of ideas for aggregator features. I think a lot of them can be done better with aggregator/blog authoring software integration.

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A pretty great rant about the sorry state of aggregators. I mostly agree, and am amused by the tone of the writing.

But unless you're some anal-retentive Asperger's Syndrome poster child, you're only going to care about a sub-set of the endless sea of crap out there, and the software should help you filter it down to manageable, crunchy chunks.

Also has a link to decafbad, who has more good ideas for making aggregators more useful.

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A two-year-old article on microcontent clients: programs that integrate reading, searching, sharing, and publishing all kinds of content. Looks very interesting and might offer some perspective around a project like frassle.

(Update 8/9/04): I read the article. To summarize, it argues that reading, searching, sharing, and publishing content should be integrated. I guess that's just what it seemed like from a cursory skim… well, not every article rewards a careful reading with deeper insight.