So here’s what happened: I had this post all thought out in my head about how whenever you bookmark a page your web browser should automatically check to see if that page has an RSS or Atom feed so that you’d only have to visit bookmarked pages if you knew they’d been updated. Then I found that OmniWeb 5 is already going to do that, and it comes out tomorrow. So while The Omni Group’s genius was a few months ahead of mine, I’m still going to write about why it’s a good idea.
Most people don’t use newsreaders. Even if one-click subscription worked well and using newsreaders brainlessly easy, it still wouldn’t make a lot of sense for most people to use a separate program for update notification. Obviously there are plenty of hardcore users who read hundreds of news feeds a day and want to be able to quickly scan through their sources, but most everyone else keeps it under seventy-five. Most people just want to be notified that a page they like has been updated. Most people would also prefer to read the page in its original context instead of as a stripped down version in a newsreader. Many pages often contain ancillary content that isn’t syndicated but readers might enjoy. Additionally, many sites are supported by advertising that doesn’t get syndicated into XML, so if readers visited the actual sites, they’d be doing their part in supporting the content provider. Jeffrey Zeldman argues very eloquently against reading pages in really simple syndicated formats:
[…] text alone does not equal content […] We can readily see the benefits of an RSS feed for BBC News, and it also makes sense on sites where page layout is primarily a delivery system for writing, as cigarettes are a delivery system for nicotine.
But most smokers would rather puff than inject nicotine, and most of us used to be as hungry to see a site as to read its words. RSS feeds may subtly discourage that impulse to seek, see, bookmark, and return.
That’s just a small quote; everyone should really go read the entire post. When you come back I think you’ll agree that in context content and form shouldn’t be separable. Power uses may still want to view everything in their newsreaders, but most people would rather get right to the page.
Comment notification
Assuming that OmniWeb’s smart bookmarks work like a charm, it’ll be easy to visit my favorite sites whenever they publish new articles. It’ll also be easy to participate in discussions on weblogs. But as I’ve said before, weblogs don’t do a very good job of keeping discussions going. Weblogs need comment notification. I had suggested that pages should automatically send out emails to let people know whenever new comments are left on a weblog post they’re interested in. xwhite pointed out that this would probably get out of hand. He says:
I’m still not 100% convinced that emails are what i want from subscribing. Ideally for me threads I have subscribed to would appear as something more like an alert/notification. A My Threads section maybe?
I see some problems with the emails too. […] If I went to lunch after commenting on say… 8 posts… I might have 40 emails that are now out of context and i’d have to open and close them each of them.
Also, you only need to know that a new comment has been left on a post, and wouldn’t really want one email per comment. So what you actually want is just to know that the page has been updated since you last visited it, which RSS aggregation would do perfectly (as Courtney suggests).
I usually don’t care about keeping up with comments on most of the posts I read, so I don’t want my aggregator to notify me whenever a comment is left on any post on a page. What I’d like to see is a smart bookmark folder just for comment feeds. Whenever I go to a site and find a thread that I want to watch, I could add it to this folder and my browser would keep a handy list of all the discussions I’m following. This way I’d stay up-to-date on the discussion, and the conversation could move much more quickly as people wouldn’t be simply forgetting to participate. People could stay involved in many threads at once while having notification handled by one centralized solution.