Comments on: Newspapers, RSS for the Mainstream User

By: Mainstream Users Do Not Want The News Sites We Give Them | Regular Geek

Mainstream Users Do Not Want The News Sites We Give Them | Regular Geek — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:26:38 +0000

[...] talked about newspapers and RSS for the mainstream a little over two months ago, but that was in the context of newspapers doing the right things [...]

By: » Connecting with late adopter friends by distributing XML feeds by mail

» Connecting with late adopter friends by distributing XML feeds by mail — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:17:12 +0000

[...] a single feed ? Or did your technophobe girlfriend miss the latest photo album you posted ? With a wide variety of source acknowledging that web feeds ans web feeds readers being perceived as too t…, many of us have scaled back this particular evangelization effort to focus it on users ripe for [...]

By: A Promising Future for Newspapers « I’m Not Actually a Geek

A Promising Future for Newspapers « I’m Not Actually a Geek — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:31:39 +0000

[...] utterance of Steve Jobs or what Google is releasing today. I like the way Rob Diana put it on his Regular Geek blog: People have been calling for the death of newspapers for quite some time. In their current [...]

By: Making it Really Simple | brants

Making it Really Simple | brants — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:15:17 +0000

[...] the best tangential take on this report that I read happens to be here. In addition to a take on the entire subject, this post points out that newspapers could have a [...]

By: robdiana

robdiana — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:28:35 +0000

Svetlana,
Linking is not a problem when you provide good content. I understand the point about explaining what iGoogle or Netvibes are meant to be, but that does not mean they are easier to use. That was really what I was trying to focus on here.

Explaining RSS is really a lost cause because there is not an easy way to use it when it comes to mainstream users. I think the newspapers and news sites could have an advantage as people already want to go to them for information. They can just be an RSS aggregator underneath and present it in a newspaper-like fashion.

By: robdiana

robdiana — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:24:26 +0000

Andray
I have only heard of noovo, but have not taken a look. From your description, it does sound interesting, so I will probably be requesting an account in a few days.

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:18:42 +0000

Rob, actually when I was talking about start pages in the post you quoted here (thank you!) as easier to understand than tools like Google Reader, my main point was that they can be easier explained as something of a dashboard to the web where you can get the instant view of everything that may be important. And the second (and most important) part is that the start pages offer a selection of default widgets that new users can easily choose from depending on their interests. I’m not talking about actually adding an RSS feed for some random blog, this I can imagine must be a really painful task for my mother

And I agree with you that newspapers may very well eventually evangelize the RSS idea to the mainstream market – hope this is exactly what happens as I don’t see bloggers explaining what RSS is to vast majority of people and even making them use it.

By: Andray

Andray — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:55:33 +0000

We designed Noovo (http://www.noovo.com) with this precise problem in mind. Dealing with information overload, the key question is what is relevant to a user and that includes the notions of relative reputation and context.

Noovo will recommend you content based on deep graph mining (where every activity is a node) and you can also manually discover relevant sources without the need to know what RSS is all about. Noovo helps you aggregate your content from your web services (just like FriendFeed, but in a more MySpacesihs way) and distribute other way around.

Email me at nabergoj at noovo com for a test account.