It’s an IP focussed company so let’s see how it goes. The PlayOn team already have a blog.

If you’re wondering why I’m posting twice in the same month (how shocking!), it’s because things are changing around here. You are reading this via the RSS feed so you won’t be aware that I have redesigned the blog’s homepage. My intent was to make this medium more conducive to writing quick posts on more diverse subjects yet still keep it hanging together as a coherent whole. Because let’s face it: something has got to change around here if I’m going to write more and better.

My first goal was to deemphasize the “latest post”, so everything got shrunk a bit until it was only readable by expanding with a click. (It has a nice flowy animation too. You know me, dear reader, I’m all about the javascrizzle.) Still, you can get a taster with a quick glance, and not just for one post but for the whole site, stretching back months at the moment. Please let me know if you disagree, dear reader. I value your opinion greatly.

There’s also a very simple greedy algorithm for sorting posts into streams by category/tag, so that the casual reader (not you, no no) can follow my stream of thought on a subject that interests them. And possibly ignore others. Most blogs don’t do much with the categories except list them in the sidebar. I think it’s time we made use of them. I guess it’s related to this unsubscribing thing that James Corbett is always going on about. Many people don’t want to commit the same way you have. They just want to dip in now and then to see if anything interesting has been going on. Call it grazing if you will. I noticed myself doing this recently for some blogs.

So, I understand that RSS is making the “homepage” increasingly irrelevent. Being an RSS subscriber yourself, you care little for homepages. In fact this change might even effect you negatively if I start spewing out any old rubbish that only looks good on the homepage because you can’t quite read it. NO, don’t unsubscribe!! I need you loyal reader. Without you I’m just sitting here sadly typing to myself. I haven’t forgotten you. I’m also thinking about the RSS angle. And, hopefully, RSS aggregators will pick up on the idea and start doing something useful with tags too.

Until then, let the others fly by, grazing me as they pass. You and I have a special, enduring relationship, dearest subscriber.

Yours always,

Eureka Man

PS: If you want to use the theme for your own wordpress blog (I loved that last post by the way, you put things so much more eloquently than I ever could), just leave a comment and I’ll work out how to package it up nicely.

Here are the first few species I can separate out of the feed ecosystem:

1. Temporary, throwaway feedsComment feeds come to mind. This is where the blogosphere ‘conversation’ needs a lot of work. If I make a comment on someone else’s blog I often want to keep track of replies and other comments. So I subscribe to the comment feed. But I don’t want to be notified of every comment from that blog forever. After a period during which I haven’t been interested in the comments for a while, my aggregator should stop displaying them to me. And I don’t want a list of all the comment feeds I’ve subscribed to previously, just the latest ones. I don’t know of any aggregator that monitors your attention like this yet.
2. Potentially interesting feedsThese are almost like bookmarks (and better than bookmarks really). Often when I subscribe to a feed in Bloglines what I’m really doing is bookmarking. I’m saying “This person/group produces good stuff. I’m registering my interest.” But I bookmark way too many sites to actually read all their updates. I just want the best stuff. A list-of-feeds interface is no good here either. This is where something like Tailrank comes in. It tries to present you the latest interesting conversations going on in your selection of feeds and just beyond.

   What would be great is if del.icio.us auto-discovered the feeds from my bookmarks and had it’s own intelligent aggregator. Or if Tailrank could sync with my del.icio.us bookmarks and then auto-discover the feeds for itself (Kevin, this seems like a good way of making yourself an attractive acquisition for Yahoo). Or if, when I bookmark a page through a browser like Flock, it also submitted the associated feed to my Tailrank-style aggregator.

3. Seldom updated, but important feedsHere I’m thinking, for example, of things like update feeds for software libraries I use or vanity searches. I don’t want a list of feeds here because I don’t need it. I just need to notified when any of these feeds contain a new item, and then I’m going to read it immediately.
4. friend’s and must-see feedsWith these feeds, I want to at least glance at every item that comes through, maybe not immediately but eventually. These can be almost as important as personal email. List-of-feeds works alright here. My current personal project is addressing this latter species (and the interface is experimental, you might say).

It’s good to see that the Google Reader team plan to build several different interfaces on top of their feed reading back-end. I’d like to see them making it easy for users to subscribe to a feed in one of their interfaces and not the others, whether by tagging or whatever. The fact is that the feed-space is far from homogenous. There really is no “best” way to consume all the feeds that interest you.