Personal RSS Aggregators

By Jon Udell

May 27, 2002

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Not long ago, RSS (Rich Site Summary) aggregators were large centralized services: My Netscape, My UserLand, Meerkat. Today, RSS news plays a diminished role at My Netscape. The My UserLand service is decommissioned. Meerkat remains a popular feature of the O'Reilly Network, enabling techies to read and search the standard sources on topics like Linux, XML, and security. But there have been just seven new channels added to Meerkat so far this year. Clearly, it's not keeping up with the explosion of activity in blogspace.

Has RSS run out of steam? Quite the opposite. There's more action than ever, but it's shifted into a decentralized mode. That's just what the RSS network needed to do in order to truly operate at Internet scale.

I've been running Radio UserLand for about four months now, and the built-in RSS aggregator has changed how I process information in a dramatic way. At first, my list of channels was biased towards "official" sources — that is, the RSS channels published by newspapers, magazines, and web sites in the areas of interest to me. Increasingly, though, I now rely on other people who are active in these areas, and who are publishing weblogs to which I can subscribe by way of RSS.

There is a deep principle at work here. The relevance engine that powers the emerging RSS network is, very much like Google's relevance engine, decentralized and ultimately social in nature. The links that Google counts are, as Cory Doctorow has said in a beautiful essay, "made by human beings, doing what they do best, link by link, drip by drip." Similarly, the raw output of the online news collective is filtered for me by people doing what they do best: spotting patterns, alerting the tribe.

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