I am preparing for a webinar tomorrow in which I hope to explain RSS to the participants. It used to be easy. You had feeds, you had aggregators, the principles seemed clear. Now it has all got muddy with things like Paper.li and Flipboard “making things easier”. But they are not easier, they are more managed.
In the attempt to make things easier they have changed the nature of the thing you are trying to do. This happens all the time. Because people are disinclined to make the effort to learn how to do a worthwhile but complicated task we make things easier for them and in the process lose something.
I completely agree with you, Euan. Even though RSS is at the heart of every participative technology (from Facebook’s wall to Yammer’s home feed to Twitter’s lists), contemporary design is removing any references to this unique piece of technology. Even newspaper are making it more difficult to extract the pieces you want to read. Why? Probably because some of their clients like News aggregators as Factiva, pay for indexing their websites and letting the customer pay to search in ‘their’ repositories of information (even though this is something part of the open Web).
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I got the chance to ask Dave Winer about it on the episode of Shift that we just published. Worth a listen. http://business-shift.com/podcast/2013/12/9/shift-episode-017-dave-winer
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