Dave Winer complains today that a story about RSS left out any mention of Radio Userland. According to Winer,
There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you’re done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio’s aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something.
No, actually Radio’s aggregation features suck for precisely this reason. I know this because I’m using Radio as an aggregator.
Well, technically I’m ignoring it at the moment because it’s impossible to actually use Radio Useralnd if you want to subscribe to a lot of feeds.
This is something I’ve written about before. Net News Wire has a very nice system that lets you organize and aggregate feeds by categories the user defines (see this nice screenshot). But Dave doesn’t work that way, so the odds of seeing this in Radio is non-existent (please port Net News Wire to Windows!)
Dave says all you need are your feeds in reverse chronological order like a weblog. Earth to Dave — relying on reverse chronological listing as the main organizing principle for news is stupid. Ever visited Google News? Notice how they divided the stories into categories? Same thing with the New York Times.
But the world according to Dave is that all anybody ever needs is a reverse chronological listing and so that’s that. As a result I see RSS feeds arranged like this:
Wi-Fi Networking News (2 items)
AllAfrica News: Zimbabwe (2 items)
AllConsuming ( 9 items)
BoingBoing! (6 items)
CNET News.Com (5 items)
Moreover Animal News (3 items)
Moreover Asia (6 items)
NYT Business (1 item)
NYT Homepage (5 items)
Tomalak’s Realm (1 item)
BBC News Home Page (7 items)
Animal Concerns News Service (5 items)
Moreover SE Asia (14 items)
Moreover Asia Pacific (15 items)
Samizdata.Net (2 items)
Register (1 item)
FARK (5 items)
Yahoo! Oddly Enough (5 items)
Yahoo! Strange News (2 items)
Reuters Science (2 items)
Scientific American (1 items)
New Scientist (2 items)
EurekAlert (1 item)
Economist:Books (1 item)
Dave would never have the animal-related feeds and tech-related feeds grouped together, so why would I ever want this? It’s the Henry Ford principle — any color you like as long as it’s black (or reverse chronological).
The upshot is that I rarely bother to even check Radio’s aggregated feed anymore. It’s much more efficient to visit these sites in groups using Mozilla’s tab features than it is to wade through the chaotic output of Radio Userland.