2004: The Turning Point
January 26th, 2004In a fantastic essay, Stephen Downes, writes:
“Personalization is about choice, and so not surprisingly efforts to personalize within an environment of restricted choice have not been successful. Even technologies that are forward looking such as RSS have followed thus far the brand-first approach to feed reading. You subscribe to Wired News, or CNet, or Instapundit, and put up with a certain amount of annoying off-topic content to get the stuff you want. But all that’s about to change with the advent of topic-based (or geography based, or affinity based) mixed feeds.
The year 2004 could be the year that personalization of the Web finally succeeds (it will definitely make a mark, but it could be a few years before it reaches the mainstream). By combining the information provided by non-blog blogging with tailored feeds drawing resources from hundreds or thousands of sources, readers will be able to be presented exactly what they want. Into this same environment will be piped whatever replaces email, so that all a person’s essential Web reading (and very little non-essential Web reading) will be available through a single application.”
A great quote for my presentation at CIL on personalization and customization of RSS. I have always thought that syndication of content would go beyond just subscribing to feeds from one resource and getting every post from that resource. It has to or RSS will fail. Which is why engines like Feedster, Waypath, and BlogDigger are so interesting at the moment. Throw in a search term and you get the feeds that mention the search term in your aggregator. Of course, it needs to go beyond that. We need contextual searches and other types of mechanisms for customization and personalization. Keywords are just that…keywords. They need to be placed in the right context to be useful. (essay link via STLQ)