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RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

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Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#61
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall 10 years ago it wasn’t nearly as terrible. Did something happen to the bbc?

Best i can tell, there is a new generation of "journalists" coming onboard that have been trained in the style of "blogs". And it seems to be far from unique to the BBC, you can notice it with all the national broadcasters (Though BBC being English and thus have a worldwide reach in its original form, is more noticeable outside of the UK).

Although I have to be honest, the tagesschau is still immune to this trend. Let’s hope it never arrives at http://www.tagesschau.de/

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#62
post #40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they do those things. But they make up a minority of their magazine content. They still do a lot of 'hard news' stuff (along with the vast majority of their output which is straight 'normal news'). For example, just this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/g4s_brook_house_i...

> But they make up a minority of their magazine content. No excuse. That crap is paid for with my taxes. They don't need to lower themselves to that standard. That shit permeates, you know? The news side will look like that eventually. I'd have thought taxes + license fee would be enough to avoid the race to the bottom, but here we are.

Why not make a complaint where they can actually see it, then? http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/

Try to steer their decisions with your voice.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#65

I like RSS and use it daily, however the main drawback is a lot of sites tend to truncate their articles and have a "read more" link. Not so useful when you're in an offline environment like the London underground (where I usually catch up with my feeds at the end of the day) Facebook and Twitter suffer from the same issue though

Most UK phone networks let you use the free Virgin WiFi in the underground now.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#66
post #38
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hard news > The BBC Have you visited the BBC News website recently? They even have Daily Mail style headlines now, where a random word is capitalised for emphasis: "Up to NINE terrible things happened" I browse with an ad blocker, so those are actual headlines, not Outbrain/Taboola (ugh) links.

I recall 10 years ago it wasn’t nearly as terrible. Did something happen to the bbc?

Blair made them compete on ratings which is retarded when you have a guaranteed income. Another thing he ruined.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#67
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together." Could you flesh this out a little? What is it that you want to see?

I would like to publish an output from my reading as RSS channels - then other people could subscribe to those channels making a full circle. I don't know what these channels would be - we could start with simple 'liked articles', then readers would count in how many 'liked channels' from friends a given article is and do other heuristics. But everybody would be able to make his own channels and then observe if peopl…

https://www.w3.org/annotation/

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#68
post #46

I am not the developer behind it, but I want to advertise it: http://fetchrss.com/ is awesome. I can fetch stuff from public Facebook pages I need (without having a fb account) and create a RSS feed of them. Then with ifttt.com I send updates to my mailbox: awesome. Also, fuck Facebook and long live RSS and the open web.

Hmm... this looks really interesting. Gonna' try this with a few reddit links (/r/sub1+sub2...) to see how it handles that. For some reason my current reader is now having problems.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#69
I used to follow around 60 RSS feeds. Then Twitter became the place where stuff surfaced. A few months ago I got an iPad and started using Apple News and I've found myself visiting Twitter less. Twitter still surfaces more stuff, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Apple's news app fits my desires just about perfectly and it's getting better and better at showing me stuff I want to read.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#70
post #22

It's a shame that fewer and fewer sites offer feeds. Most of them still do, luckily, but I've had to dig up http://feed43.com about once every two months. Though I wasn't really aware that some feed readers could perhaps generate feeds automatically, I'll have to try that out sometime.

Also, look at a site's source code. The RSS button may not be displayed but I often find the rss link buried in the html. Publishers may not even realize that their plug-n-play blogging platform is automatically creating feeds for them.
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