The demise of Google Reader produced an outpouring of online emotion, as fans lamented the loss of a product they relied on to capture the droplets of compelling information amid the fire hose of online content.
But some commentators saw a more ominous subtext in this week’s announcement that the online giant is officially pulling the plug on Reader, which allowed people to track and scan multiple RSS feeds that update whenever a particular author or publication adds content.
Many read the news as a kind of nail in the coffin for RSS, and some worried that amounted to a victory for “silos” on the Internet, forcing people to navigate to particular sites (say www.nytimes. com) to ingest their daily reading.
Eric Goldman, law professor at Santa Clara University, went a little further in a post for Forbes. He argued that this blow to RSS, which feeds you news directly instead of forcing you to seek it out, enhances the troubling tendency of people to gravitate to Internet echo chambers, where they encounter only voices and opinions that support their own.
“Without an RSS reader as reliable and efficient as Google Reader, my information flows will be lower-volume, slower, more heavily intermediated by third-party algorithms, and – as the dystopians predicted – less diverse,” he wrote.
I agree with Goldman that this is a dangerous trend that’s already created a far more polarized society, where each side of debates now feels entitled not just to their own opinion, but their own set of facts.
But I don’t think the death of one product or even one technology would notably worsen this.
For starters, RSS may or may not be in that much trouble. There are already plenty of popular products that use it, like Flipboard, Feedly and Pulse, and probably some more on the way.
That alone addresses a big part of this.
But ultimately I think RSS matters a lot less in the age of social media, as anyone can follow their favorite writers and publications directly on Twitter and, to some degree, Facebook.
Goldman addressed this, saying he believes social media simply doesn’t work as well for news: “I already use it extensively as a complement to RSS, but it’s scattershot and much slower to read.”
But I actually think it’s better. I dropped Google Reader long ago as I found it far easier – and much more entertaining – to use Twitter as my news feed. In addition to seeing what my favorite writers post, I immediately spot breaking and trending stories by people I never knew to follow. I also get to interact with them, posing questions or posting counterpoints.
With both RSS and social media, I believe you get out of your feed what you put into it. The more you tweak your follows and lists, the better and more personalized your results become.
But beyond that, I simply don’t believe that people would be any more broadminded in setting up their RSS feeds than they are in choosing whom to follow on Twitter, Facebook or any other platform. And I definitely don’t believe that readers are going to rush back to reading single news outlets promising “all the news that’s fit to print” anytime soon.
The Internet broke that model long ago, and all the media kings’ horses and men (and women) have not been able to put it back together again – much as they’ve tried.
People obviously still seek out general-interest publications (luckily for me), but it’s generally just one part of their reading experience.
More typically, modern readers cobble together personalized daily briefings on their favorite subjects from across the Web. They hop, skip and jump their way through news on their favorite sports teams, actors, hobbies, stocks, local news and more, arriving there via social media, aggregators, RSS feeds, search pages and links within other stories.
It’s why Twitter works, why aggregators do so well and why tablet apps weren’t the panacea the industry had hoped. It’s also why we’re not likely to return to media silos anytime soon, whatever the fate of RSS.
Engadget Expand-ing: Engadget is following its tech blog peers into the world of branded conferences, kicking off Engadget Expand at Fort Mason on Saturday.
It’s the first such event for AOL’s site for the device-obsessed, and fits into a larger trend among media outlets leveraging their brands into profitable events, drawing dollars from sponsors and ticket fees.
Engadget is taking a different tack, however, one more in keeping with its editorial voice and audience. Instead of a $1,000-plus ticket fee for a conference largely designed as a networking event for buyers, sellers and investors, they’re charging $50 in hopes of drawing the die-hard gadget fans who read the site.
“Some conferences feel like relentless homework; this one is supposed to be fun,” said Ned Desmond, general manager for AOL’s tech brands. “It should really be a consumer-oriented event and dialed into what those ‘passionistas’ are interested in.”
Speakers include Matt Rogers, co-founder of smart thermostat company Nest; Scott Croyle, vice president of design at HTC; and Alex Hall, head of Google’s Lunar X Prize, a competition to nudge along the first privately funded effort to send a robot to the moon.
There will be the predictable array of consumer gadgets on display, as well as boundary-pushing stuff like the robotic “exoskeleton” technology from Ekso Bionics of Richmond, which is already helping paraplegics to walk.
Desmond said they’re expecting about 1,500 people to attend, the midpoint of their initial expectation range, and already know they’ll turn a profit. The company expects to throw the show twice a year, with the next one in New York.
James Temple is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Dot-Commentary appears three days a week. E-mail: jtemple@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jtemple
Source:
http://www.news.ezonearticle.com/2013/03/15/google-readers-demise-not-end-all/
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