Comments on: Cleaning House

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:46:34 +0000

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.

By: Dougal Campbell

Dougal Campbell — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:41:36 +0000

Sheesh, 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.
They like it when we try to make more work for them. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:13:38 +0000

Yeah, I know I’m asking for pie-in-the-sky, post-1.0 stuff. But what am I paying you guys for?

By: Alex King

Alex King — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:02:43 +0000

Dougal asked about this in the forums - it's a bit tricky.

By: The Indiana Jones School of Management

The Indiana Jones School of Management — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 23:01:24 +0000

Oh, like April showers on slick cement…

[Sweet. I use a Caedmon’s lyric as an allusive title, then talk about nothing involving them.]
I just had an idea based loosely on the house cleaning concept … a “rainy_day” tag for feeds. Y’know, feeds that I’d …

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 22:41:37 +0000

Oh, 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.

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 22:39:05 +0000

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.