Customized Feeds

People are advocating for customized feeds.

I really don't like this idea. I've been moving cities/countries lately, and I see content based on where I am. Whether its Google or Facebook its just far more likely that a feed will show content based on my location. Sites popular in those areas will rank higher and more prominently in the feeds than if I was located elsewhere.

I don't like this. If I subscribe to a feed I want to see all content. Otherwise I wouldn't have subscribed to the feed. What you read, shapes what you think about. I want to see all the news, not just those items that people find compelling in that particular location.

Customized content gives you the impression that something is really popular. When really the opposite might be true. Yet because a reader moves around in circles where one view point is popular, it will seem to the reader that this view is the prevalent one. How can you make informed decisions on a topic if the feeds provide a skewed perspective?

And rarely have I seen content that is better when the feed is customized.

how important is a title?

Dave Winer talks a little about titles, and why some posts of his don't have titles. I love the way Dave's software works, and sometimes wish for similar software. Their are times when I have posts that I don't want to give titles to. However, one of my friends subscribes to my feed via livebookmarks in firefox. And I found that if a post doesn't have a title, its ignored. So titles are important for me, and I wish it wasn't so.

I haven't heard Dave talk about the OPML editor recently. I wonder how active the development for it is. If I could get it to post a blog to my server, I'd definitely use the software. I'll have to try it again soon.

del.icio.us

I unsubscribed from http://del.icio.us/tags/python today. More and more of the links were spam, and it was just irritating going through reading those ridiculous titles. On top of that, their were repeat entries which meant the link should be a bookmark, that can be perused every few days or so at a less frequent pace. Technorati is doing a good job of keeping spam away, but most of the links I get are from livejournal. They are mostly journal entries of people thinking of learning Python, or installing Linux. But their are still some good articles I find, such as "Feeding a Large-scale Physics Application to Python". Hence I'll stay subscribed to those feeds for now.