RSS feedKeeping the theme…
Having defined the main blogging types, I now sort my (RSS and Atom) feeds by their collection or connection value, in other words by their value as item catalogues. I then sort these within each of my information categories. So for miscellaneous items for example, I have the collections at the top, like BoingBoing, followed by individual feeds which aren’t as regular or are more inventive.
Surprisingly, I found I’d been sorting things this way anyway, but had never realised why. Whenever I launch my reader, I want to see a summary of everything I’m about to digest, which is where the collections come in. Then I want to drill into individual items, both from the collections and from the specialist feeds I’ve subscribed to.
This fairly clear distinction compares quite well to portals vs. sites, or even directories vs. documents. And when you explain this to people, they’re more likely to understand the big difference between RSS format (sic) and the Atom API/protocol (sic) (visual clues provided free of charge 🙂 ). It is not the critical difference, but should be a compelling one for bloggers.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)