What’s wrong with RSS readers?

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Ian Betteridge

Dave Winer should know:

If you miss five days of reading the news because you were on vacation (good for you!) the newspaper you read the first day back isn’t five times as thick as the normal day’s paper. And it doesn’t have your name on the cover saying “Joe you haven’t read 1,942,279 articles since this paper started.” It doesn’t put you on the hook for not reading everything anyone has ever written. The paper doesn’t care, so why does your RSS reader?

Dave’s totally right. It’s one of the reason why I probably read more of my RSS feeds via Flipbook (which doesn’t punish you for not reading in this way) than Google Reader.

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  • http://twitter.com/ckuettner ckuettner

     The paper doesn’t care, so why does your RSS reader?

    Because: you do not have editor-guy installed on Reader.  You have that guy in newspaper ad you choose which one to read based on his work.  (Of course most people don’t make it conscious to them, that the editor-guy is the one doing the work that sets tonality and so on and lets you like or dislike a specific paper.)  But it is.  You can be sure: because editor-guy does job, headline, big-headline, big-big-headline, stuff you just have to know about: reaches frontpage.  Reader cannot do that.  There is no AI that sorts your feet and does the work, that fancy web-dude calls: curating.