Serendipity and RSS
April 5th, 2006Ken Varnum has a well thought-out post about the lost art of browsing and finding something that you wouldn’t have normally seen otherwise. He links to an article on the topic, from which he postulates:
“The same is true with the feeds I’ve chosen to put in to my aggregator. While there’s still some opportunity for serendipity in the not-so-random choices of my favorite bloggers, it’s limited serendipity. By subscribing to feeds, I’m picking my headlines in advance, and somehow feel I’m missing good stuff. Even my keyword search feeds in Technorati and Bloglines are narrow (I haven’t struck the balance between specific enough to be manageable and broad enough to be interesting). Again, I’m not necessarily looking for good stuff that’s germane, but good stuff that makes me stop and think.”
At face value, serendipity and aggregators seem like opposites. The initial point of RSS is was consume what you want, not what you think you might want. But it’s more than that though. It all comes down to a) How much you read and b) How liberal you are in your subscriptions. If I only read 10 feeds, but they are so dead on with what is important to me, the serendipity goes out the window. But, if I haphazardly subscribe to every feed I see, then the serendipitous nature of my reading increases in probability. Even though RSS was supposed to provide a lower S/N ratio than we were used to, I’m afraid that it’s ease of use has caused RSS to become yet another place to store lots of unrelated content.
So, can there be serendipity in aggregators? Sure, if you consciously want there to be, which actually shows the power of RSS technology. Back in the hands of the user. RSS is much slicker than reading the newspaper and takes away the ability to “get lost” in the dailies. You see, if I want, I can only read the Arts section of the NYT in my aggregator. But there is no conceivable way that I will ONLY read the Arts section if I had the physical paper in front of me.