RSS and Taxonomies
This item from Burnham’s Beat discusses RSS’ limitations and its potential for failure because of information overload and the lack of ability to find relevant topics and organize feeds. As I read it, I couldn’t help recalling what people were saying in the early days of the Internet–some of which are still said today.
The article gives some excellent background about RSS’ roots before it advocates for the use of taxonomies and classification to help with information overload caused by the number of available RSS feeds.
I’ve heard Shimon talk about many of the things in the article. His Frassle blog attempts to address some of these problems. (I’ve written about Frassle before, so I’m not going into detail here.) But Shimon’s system does this on a personal level. It looks like Bill Burnham is thinking about organizing and categorizing feeds on a much larger level. He writes:
“Even if these meta-directories are created, it’s not clear that the RSS community will embrace them as they introduce a centralized intermediary into an otherwise highly decentralized and simplistic system. However, it is clear that without the use of meta-directories and their standardized classifications and taxonomies the RSS community is in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own success and becoming the ‘push’ of 2004.”
I think having a taxonomy/directory structure could really aid in feed/resource discovery. RSS is new enough that many people are still just learning about the technology and figuring out how to use it. One of the big questions I get after explaining RSS to people is how to find feeds. Many people would probably find such a directory very useful, especially if it was configured in such a way as to separate or address semantics:
Cricket (Insect)
Cricket (Sport)
One of the challenges Bill mentions is how to sort and locate individual postings within feeds. He writes that while someone may subscribe to feeds about specific topics, they might miss a lot of the buzz in the blogosphere about that topic from people who may not focus on it. For example, this blog is about news librarianship with lots of digressions into neighboring territory and some completely off the topic ramblings. Someone looking at this blog could categorize it under some derivative of the topic “news librarianship,” but would that alert someone to the threads I have about RSS feeds or copyright law? Is there a way to include this blog under those headings as well? Having different levels in the directory to rate topical coverage could be useful. Being able to list this blog under “RSS feeds” with the notation that I sometimes write about RSS could alert someone that I cover the topic, but also let them know upfront that RSS feeds aren’t my primary focus.
Thanks for sharing, Garrett.
