Cleaning House
I like Alex’s concept of cleaning house. With my participation in the Blogathon and the attendant lack of sleep/coherence after the fact, I opened up FeedLounge this morning to almost 1000 unread items. Something said, “PURGE!” So, I’ve been whittling through the list, and I’m finding that I’m purging some stuff.
Now, what I’d like FeedLounge to do for me is to note the number of manual reads—that is, me clicking on an item, looking at it, and FL marking it read for me—versus the number of times where I skim a list and then hit Mark All As Read. Because … some algorithm of that is going to tell me where some value lies, and that value has value to me.
And yes, that’s an Attention kind of thing.
And no, I haven’t talked with Alex about this. He might wrap a tire iron around my neck when he reads this, for all I know.
It’d have to be halfway intelligent, depending on a user’s habits and a feed’s characteristics. For example, when I have a feed that’s got one or two unread items in it, I manually read them most of the time. This doesn’t mean they’ve got any interest to me, it just means that it’s easier to do that than to mark them all as read. Then there are feeds like the CBC’s, where they don’t have any descriptive text in them other than the story title. I don’t click these individually (doing so wouldn’t offer me any extra information) so I always mark them as read in a batch, even though many of them are interesting to me.
And then you have to differentiate between feeds where you get the entire post (like yours) or if you get a synopsis (like on the BBC), or if that changes from post to post (like mine). If I find a CBC article interesting I’ll follow the link to get the whole story, but I don’t have to do that with your feed. Unless I want to comment, of course.
August 9th, 2005 at 17:39Oh, sure. But Alex and Scott are smart guys. I think that there’s signal:noise ratio to be found in there. It’s just that, as you note, different feeds are … different.
August 9th, 2005 at 17:41Oh, like April showers on slick cement…
[Sweet. I use a Caedmon’s lyric as an allusive title, then talk about nothing involving them.]
August 9th, 2005 at 18:01I just had an idea based loosely on the house cleaning concept … a “rainy_day” tag for feeds. Y’know, feeds that I’d …
Dougal asked about this in the forums – it’s a bit tricky.
August 9th, 2005 at 19:02Yeah, I know I’m asking for pie-in-the-sky, post-1.0 stuff. But what am I paying you guys for?
August 9th, 2005 at 19:13Sheesh, you’d think that they had more important things to work on or something. Don’t they realize that you and I generate the most innovative ideas for FeedLounge? Heck, they should just turn the whole project over to us!
Okay, maybe not
But just added a new suggestion. I’m sure they’ll love it.
August 10th, 2005 at 08:41They like it when we try to make more work for them. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.
Dougal: It’s a good thing that we’re both way bigger than Alex. If he comes after us, well … we can just sit on him.
Wouldn’t you love to be on the FL backchannel? I bet they tell redneck jokes.
August 10th, 2005 at 08:46