DrunkenBlog

RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable (Redux)

I had to include the above screenshot, both because I love O'Reilly and it was awesome to see the site on it... and they misspelled DrunkenBlog. Highly amusing.

I didn't quite understand how the category was chosen, and when I emailed Derrick Story to inquire I was notified that I was blocked by their spamfilters.

*picks his ego up off the floor*

Either way, the roundtable got some attention, and I meant to have the redux out a few days after it went out. Obviously that didn't happen, but I was listening, and the redux is now in danger of getting itself lapped by a month so I wanted to bang it out.

Where appropriate, I'm going to aggregate and paraphrase some of the questions I got more than three of, as I'm taking care of the others via email.

Which program do you use? Which do you recommend I use?

Not even going there, it just wouldn't be appropriate as that's not what people signed on for. They are all solid apps or I wouldn't have included them (not saying that apps that weren't included aren't solid). This is a case where there's quite a bit of differentiation, and there are going to be different strokes for different folks.

I expected others to fill in the gaps as to what they used and why, and some were inspired and went a bit further, which is really cool.

Your questions were a little long... I know it's your blog, but I thought this was about them?

Heh, brevity is not my strong suit in general, but yes some where longer than they previously have been. I went into the roundtable with a few goals, which the authors of the program were made aware of. One of the foremost goals was that I wanted it to be accessible for a wide variety of people.

People are starting to see RSS/XML tags all over the place, but it can still be somewhat of an ethereal concept. To that end, yes some of the questions had some setup, just so that your average person wouldn't feel lost going into it and would hopefully take more away from it. The idea should have been someone could go into the roundtable with only a vague idea of what's going on in the RSS world, and come out with a decent snapshot.

Some of your questions were just stupid to ask the author of an aggregator.

You should have seen the ones that weren't included. :)

One of things that made me think of doing the roundtable was that I think a lot of the things going on with RSS are multi-faceted. Meaning they involve the aggregators, users, and syndicators and/or publishers... which means they need to be talking to each other to see what the other side is thinking. And outside of random blog posts scattered around the internet there didn't seen to be enough of that.

Originally, the idea was to include syndicators and publishers, but it just would have changed the scope so drastically I dropped it. I really wanted to keep the scope sane so it had a better chance of actually happening, but at the same time I wanted to give those on the other side of the RSS fence an idea of where the aggregators' heads were on various issues. This is why some of the questions seemed geared towards what end users care about, and some seem geared towards things end users couldn't care less about.

For what it's worth, I'm working on one with some larger syndicators and publishers who are using RSS, and it'll work much of the same way.

I was interested in reading it, but found the cheerleading tone distasteful...

There were a ton of these, partly because I have a relatively diverse group of readers, and partly because it got linked on Slashdot. I'm paraphrasing, and leaving out words like pandering, schill, sell-out and sycophant. Most of it seemed to centered around this question:

Relative to its marketshare, Mac OS X has a disproportionately rich variety of RSS aggregators for users to choose from. Why do you think this is?"

People seem to have missed some of the point of that question, and I'll admit some of the participants ran with it in a ra-ra way, but that isn't something I can blame them for: Presidents kiss babies for a reason. I also could have phrased it better, so I'll elaborate on the logic behind the question.

While I was doing my research for the roundtable, I found a hair over 40 full RSS aggregators available for Windows, and around 7 to 8 full RSS aggregators for the Mac. Computing platforms are like an ecosystem, in that the larger they are, the more variety they can support.

In most cases, the options available to OS X users mirror their marketshare... namely, they're proportional. I'm primarily interested in the cases where it's disproportional, both positive and negative, as that's where things get interesting, and that's why I feel it's a valid question.

Where did you get your RSS icon? Can I use it?

Heh, how much attention people paid to that icon really kinda threw me. I don't think there really is an official RSS icon.

Lots of people seem to be using the one Apple is using for Safari RSS, which is blue, and FireFox's is orange. For various reasons, the icon is the product of five minutes in Photoshop taken from the redesign of the site I'm working on. You're welcome to use it as-is, as that's about all that exists.

Why didn't you include product x y z?

In some cases they were contacted and I couldn't talk them into it, and in some cases I couldn't get their ear at all ('drunkenbatman' can be hard to get past the spam filters), in some cases I didn't think they'd really fit, and in some cases I just missed them. Luckily some of them got mentioned in the comments, so hopefully they got some traffic from it. But if you didn't get included/mentioned for the roundtable, it wasn't an intentional slight.

Where is the podcast/MP3/AAC of the roundtable?

Yea, about that. As has been said on other sites, it was done via email. Actually, all the 'chats' are done via email, which can surprise people. It shouldn't be too surprising when you think about it, as these guys were on three different continents.

The chats do have a sense of 'flow', which is intentional but primarily comes from asking things in a certain way and having an idea of where they'll go, and because it's a multi-part process. I really don't go for a lot of those interviews that are done electronically. I'm not really going to go into why at the moment, many of them just rub me the wrong way.

To give you an idea of how the chats work, once I have someone lined up I sit down and do a pile of research on the project. I think it'd wig some people out to know how deep I go into this and how many hours it involves. I know it's freaked out some of the people I've had sit down for a chat. Then I send off a set of sequentially numbered questions (01.a, 02.a, 03.a, etc.). While they're working on their list of questions, I start preparing the next chat or project.

Once I get them back, I go through them and make up a series of follow up questions, which are also numbered (02.b, 05.b, 05.c, 09.b, 09.c, etc.). Once I get those back, I compile them sequentially and format them from straight text to HTML (the Growl chat was awful for this, I about wet myself when I saw all the links he included that had to be added... thanks Christopher), then start looking for things to include to break up the chats so they're not overwhelming (screenshots, etc.) and to give someone a better sense if they're new to whatever we're talking about as I really want things to feel accessible. Once I add those in, I whip up an intro and sometimes an addendum, then post.

In the case of the roundtable, formatting meant taking the replies from each of the five and formatting them; adding (and in most cases, finding) icons, hyperlinks, spellchecking, etc., and then compiling them sequentially in a rolling format (so that whoever's answer appeared first in the first question appeared last in the second question). Then write little bios, which was fun.

I looked at a bunch of different formats to try to make it work well. Both so that it wouldn't just blend together, and that there'd be some bang-for-buck in terms of time commitment, length, etc. It would have been nice to let them respond to each other, among other things, but it just wasn't in the cards.

How did you get them all to agree to do it?

That was interesting. In some cases, they'd never heard of 'drunkenbatman' and I had to work around that. In others, they had, so I had to work around that. :)

Obviously no one wanted to go in and get blind-sided, and you could make an argument that some of them had more to gain than others. They're all amicable guys, and once they had an idea of what I was trying to do it wasn't that hard to get them on board, although I wasn't able to convince everyone. Logistics were a larger problem.

It was still somewhat of a leap of faith on their parts, and none of them had any real idea of what the other had said until it went live and I'm still grateful they all decided to roll the dice and try to do something cool.

Were they all really so... 'civil'?

Yea, they're a pretty nice group of guys. I only had to send a few replies back marked with red saying "This would be fine for a chat, but is a little too much for the roundtable.", but they all had a sense of what was appropriate and what wasn't going in.

It's ironic that all the developers you interviewed don't include your feed...

Not something I asked for or am surprised by. I have a decent chunk of readers, but most people don't quite know what to make of the site. I'm going to leave it at this for now, as I've been surprisingly good lately at not pissing off entire legions of Mac users. I'd be surprised if this changed in the near future.

I'd love to have one of these for Windows RSS readers...

So would I! Like I said, the next RSS thing I'll do will be with larger syndicators and publishers, and I have a bunch signed up and I'm worming my way through the PR chain of others. I also have one with Linux and Windows aggregators penciled in for the third, but if someone picked up the gauntlet before I was able to get around to it, that'd be cool.

Will you do more of these with other types of applications?

I'm certainly considering it, as long as there was a real reason for doing it and I wasn't doing it just to do it. If you weren't careful, one of these could turn real lame, real fast.

There is a lot of work in them. It was two months, start to finish, to get the last roundtable out... and I'd had the idea a month before that. Part of it taking forever was I had a big delay in the beginning because of an accident in the family. But going beyond that, there are just some real time sinks in the process when you're dealing with the logistics of that many people.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    November 12, 2004, at 08:58 AM