| |
 |
Friday, March 08, 2002 |
|
Heads, decks, and leads
Heads, decks, and leads
I don't write in RSS, but by some kind of accident you can read my writing fairly coherently in a RSS aggregator. I never think about RSS when I'm writing Scripting News (unless I'm writing about RSS). I just write as it makes sense to me. I judge the result by how it looks in an HTML browser. Why? That's the way I've done it for the last few years. [Scripting News]
Dave, this isn't a discussion you have time for, during the upcoming "what passes for a weekend." You have a product to ship. So, file this for later. But, for the record, I do not wish to read blogs in the aggregator, where (as Shelley rightly says) they are stripped of context. I want to read blogs in situ. I want to scan for items to read (in their native context) using the aggregator.
Ideally, my aggregator would have a Pref like:
Show [Heads, Heads/Decks, Heads/Decks/Leads, All]
Default: Heads/Decks
The principle of heads, decks, and leads is a cornerstone of journalism. I don't consider myself a journalist, really, and wasn't trained as such, so I've come around to an appreciation of this principle more from an information engineering perspective. In engineering terms, we think about optimal allocation of resources. The resource of interest here is one of the most precious there is: human attention. Newspapers and magazines structure themselves using heads, decks, and leads because they know that human attention is a finite resource, and must be conserved.
A strategy that will work in Radio today is:
- Write standalone stories.
- Separately, write heads/decks, or heads/decks/leads, and publish only these to the homepage and category pages, with links back to the full stories. For completeness, the stories should recapitulate the heads/decks/leads.
People could do this, but in general they won't, it's too much work. If they want to blog in a way that respects the attention demands on readers, who -- as blogspace grows and diversifies, must process more and more flow, and will increasingly rely on RSS to help them do that -- they need some help structuring what they publish.
The UI issues are non-trivial, I agree. It's easy to say "just offer a template in the WYSIWYG editor" -- but in practice, it's never so easy to make this work smoothly.
This not something that needs to get solved today or tomorrow. But I believe it has to be dealt with at some point, or the knowledge network that is growing around this technology will be unnecessarily stunted.
10:15:33 PM 
|
|
|
We demand privacy! Yeah, right.
"It's not a good sign for secure e-mail demand, despite consumers' concern for online privacy."
Eighteen employees were laid off as a result of Network Associate's disbanding the PGP unit.
Network Associates drops PGP encryption. ZDNet Mar 8 2002 5:52PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]
I've used a client digital certificate for 5 years, and I sign all my email messages. Over the years, I think I've exchanged encrypted messages with about a half-dozen people. And three of those were cryptographers.
8:49:02 PM
|
|
|
RSS, supernodes, and Gladwellian Connectors
RSS, supernodes, and Gladwellian Connectors
Both Jonathon's article and its commentary are of interest. In the article, Jonathon concludes:
The answer seems simple: offer the option to publish the title but not the content to RSS. Michael points to a side benefit: "It would give the art of writing headlines a whole new life."
In the commentary, Dave says:
Write as it makes sense to you to write.
The RSS is secondary to the HTML version.
Let the RSS readers pick and choose what makes sense to them.
To me, it makes sense to write like this:
[item]
[link]...[/link]
[title]...[/title]
[description]...[/description]
[/item]
It makes sense because I want the RSS readers to be able to pick and choose what make sense to them. This is, to me, an engineering principle that helps the RSS network to scale, as I believe it needs to do by orders of magnitude.
To Shelley's point:
I like being notified when a person's weblog is changed, and check weblogs.com regularly. But to strip a person's thoughts and plunk it into a queue that gets spit out to me on this plain white background -- this isn't a true group forming and communication process, is it?
In and of itself, no. It's only one piece of the puzzle. Blogspaces today are relatively few, and relatively homogenous. The degree of overlap among blogrolls, or (what shall we call them, channelrolls? [1] [2] [3]), is quite high. This will change, I am certain, as blogspaces become many and diverse. Means of interconnecting these communities then become critical. HTML and RSS renderings will work in tandem to accomplish that interconnection, as they already do, but I foresee an even larger role for RSS.
To explain why, I refer to Malcolm Gladwell's original New Yorker story on Lois Weisberg. Here for the first time I was introduced to the notion of what I call the human supernode. We all know a few people who are wired like this, people who seem to know everyone. In geekspace, Tim O'Reilly is one such, and Dave Winer is another. Gladwell's story shows how the essential quality of Lois Weisberg is not simply "knowing everyone" but, to me more profoundly, "belonging to many quite different groups."
Elsewhere, Gladwell quantifies just how different these supernode invididuals are from ordinary folks. He ran an experiment (was this in The Tipping Point? I can't find my copy to check it) in which he presented a list of hundreds of surnames to a set of test subjects, and asked them to count the number of surnames belonging to people they knew personally. The result was not a bell curve. Most people knew a handful of the names. A very small number knew a whole lot.
My conclusion: we all want to achieve the effects that supernode inviduals do. But most of us aren't wired with the natural ability to be tuned in to many diverse groups, an ability that a lucky few are gifted with. Part of the future of RSS, as I see it, is to help the rest of us have some of the social power that those lucky few already possess.
11:45:29 AM
|
|
|
Still tinkering
A non-Radio user wrote, complaining about the unexpected result of clicking on the coffee cup. So, I've made the cup's ALT text instructions more explicit, and have added back a direct link to the RSS channel.
Is there a coffee-cup-sized version of  ?
9:59:36 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
|
|
