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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

#91
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me that is another benefit of rss. I want to do my own 'manual' filtering, to decide myself what is important to me. I do not want some algorithm to feed me. Especially not if that algorithm is commercially biased: its main goal is not to inform me, the goal is to make money from me.

The problem I've found with aggregating multiple feeds into a single chronological stream is that some feeds totally overwhelm others because they publish more frequently. If Feed A publishes 10 articles a day and Feed B publishes 10 articles a year, the articles from Feed B get totally engulfed and pushed way, way, way down the list... effectively they become invisible.

My aggregator limits the number of items by feed and by domain. The problem is less of an issue if you add many more feeds and filter harder. Those rarely publishing do still get drowned out but it gives you plenty of other things to read. Thanks to volume, at times, if the slow publisher posts something awesome (they often do) it is reposted by the more spammy domains.

I do have other ideas to fix that issue but the ink is still wet on those.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#92
post #71

I use feedbin, and I love it. At this point I tend to stop visiting sites that don't support RSS.

> I tend to stop visiting sites that don't support RSS Same here. If the site is interesting enough, I'll try and contact the owner and explain why RSS matters. Basically.. few people have the time to visit and sort through individual sites on a daily basis.

I try to visit sites without RSS but most of the time I don't even remember them.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#93
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…

I just invented this for that.

Even Shorter Syndication [ESS] AND No Nonsense Outline [NNO]

http://go-here.nl/ess-and-nno

Ill try a simplified explanation:

An NNO file is the end result of aggregation that can be used for the next session but is primal intend is publication/sharing.

It it s a comma separated text document that starts with a unix build time followed by a sorted list of items 1) feed url, 2) minutes before build, 3) title checksum

For example:

  1503411304088,
  http://example.com/rss.xml,223432,27,
  http://example2.com/rss.xml,453223,44,
  http://example3.com/rss.xml,5432242,125,
  http://example4.com/rss.xml,23143231,241
The file is build after the aggregator aggregates the users hundreds, thousands or millions of ESS, RSS and/or Atom subscriptions while reducing the result list by a configured amount. (say 3000)

When published a 2nd user can load the NNO into their aggregator which should fetch the top feed items listed in the NNO until they have a screen full of results. (scrolling loads more)

The 2nd aggregator can then proceed to fetch that users own subscriptions and/or parse additional NNO files into the result set.

When done they can publish their own NNO file to be used the same way.

Ideally the aggregators maintain their own manually unsubscribed feed list and implement a configurable filter like a word and a word combination filter, a Bayes filter, a machine learning implementation or some other filters. The news items displayed should have an indication about their origin (which NNO file) and they could provide an auto translate link or do inline-translation of headlines/articles.

Like you suggested, the point of the entire exercise is to have people access the internet without a multinational man in the middle.

I also coin ESS in the document, it is not required to make NNO work:

An ESS is a tiny comma separated text document with a unxi build date, an url for an RSS or Atom feed then, for each news item, 1) a publication date that is an offset in minutes from the build date and 2) a tiny check sum.

For example:

  1503411304088,http://example.com/rss.xml,
  0,27,
  3600,22,
  7890,142,
  23421,17
Like RSS is much smaller than the HTML document the ESS is much smaller than the RSS. The example is 71 bytes long. That is considerably smaller than a killobyte.

I would describe the problem with RSS with an analogy with juggling chain saws. :) When you toss the chain into the air it needs to land into your hand at the right moment for you to be able to toss it again.

When you request an RSS feed (or more like x per second) the results arrive with a random offset. The parser at times just sits there waiting for something to do then it is drowned in results arriving all at the same time. If that pile is large enough additional results arrive faster than the old ones can be parsed into the result set. Parsing feeds is not trivial the way it is with ESS. There are multiple formats (RSS and Atom), there can be multiple link elements with different attributes, the pubdate (or updated) has to be dug out and is not a number and lastly the feed can be quite huge.

With ESS you just take a substring (up to the first comma) and compare the number to a desired age or your oldest item.

If you or anyone else is interested in non-corporate technology just for the sake of making things great again feel free to contact me: gdewilde@gmail.com

Thanks,

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#94
post #62
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

REMEMBER TO USE CAPS!

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#95
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…

check out inoreader

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#96
post #9

Most of the sources of hard news have RSS feeds. Reuters. The BBC. The New York Times. The Hill. National Weather Service. These are all crap-free. No ads. No "10 ways to waste your time and money". Just news. I have an Model 14 Teletype tape printer from 1926 in a brass and glass case hooked up to the Reuters RSS feed. I've had this at steampunk conventions, and it usually lives in my living room. Push a button and…

Yet some RSS feeds do contain ads/spam.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#98
post #72
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.

I was not aware of feed43. Thanks. But do I have to create my own? Can I not use feeds people have already created?

You can, but there's no easy way to discover them as far as I'm aware. As in, I've always made my own.
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