“One way to get more people using SYO is to encourage feed readers like Bloglines to allow people to keep their permanent OPML file at SYO instead of at the reader. This is probably a long way off for Bloglines, the market leader for web based readers.”

Bloglines does meet you halfway, as they provide a URL for the OPML file that SYO can upload; that’s how my SYO is listed, and I believe it detects changes and incorporates them into your listing. I think that’s a better way of handling Bloglines, or any other feed reader’s, services than to try to link out of SYO, which should focus on statistical services for feeds, in my opinion.

No one outside of the 56K meme population is ever going to use such services. Feeds are a hard enough concept to sell people on — this is a long shot.

“Other ranking systems are either subjective, or forced to look at either different data (Technorati looks at links) or only data specific to their users (Bloglines ranks blogs based on subscriber numbers on Bloglines). Over time, SYO can become a true “long tail” recommendation engine if a wide swath of the users out there are willing to upload their OPML feed. And they are only a couple of steps away from being there.”

I have to sign up for SYO, just like Bloglines. How are RSS subscriptions any more relevant than links (Technorati)? By this reasoning, Technorati has the ‘true’ Top 100, since no registration is required to join it, and they use a subjective measure (links).

“But what I really want to know is what feeds I should be reading based on what I already like.”

Doesn’t findory.com/blogs already do this?

Satish,

I think anyone who’s interested in reading feeds could be a potential customer. Don’t look at the design and use of words like OPML. Think of it instead as a central repository for feed data. Over time, people may not even know they are using SYO to store their feed information, it could all be seamless through the reader. I guess what I’m trying say is, think a couple of steps ahead at what the market needs and how SYO or another service could fill that need.

The concept of feed stats and such is very interesting and innovative. As feeds take more and more a prominent place in our day-to-day lifes, this service will become extremely useful. The scope is enormous. But Dave Winer hasn’t really realised this and is turning it into just another A-Lister’s list. If we want to see favorite blogs, I can check out Technorati’s Favorites.

The RSS Aggregator, Top 100 Podcasts, etc all indicate only this. Sadly, this has no real purpose as well. There’s no tagging, clustering, no straight feed adding and more. What I expected in the RSS aggregator was a collection of articles, the user might like. Instead of pointing to other users, this should point to other blogs. Users should rate and comment on blogs. Where’s all this? Where is the social aspect? I’ve written more on this and my comments here.

In the future, I don’t see people using a service, which shows them just statistics and a bunch of popular blogs. I would like to see hottest blogs atm, trendsetters and things like that. Show people what they want and not what you think they want.

In the end, this service should be a win-win situation for both bloggers and subscribers.

Dave Winer is on the right track. He is mashing the aggration meme with the OPML meme. Huge potential. The voting, popularity filtering is there. But he is missing core feature. Tagging ? Where is the tagging ?

At present, the site is quite technical, needing detailed URLs. Clearly aimed at early adopters. Mainstream users handle tags and user names, not URL addresses for xml files.

Adding these features would unlock the potential of this site. He is close.

While this looks like a great service, it still needs a lot of work. We are the #3 podcast, and we aren’t even listed on the top podcasts page.

http://www.web20show.com/

Don’t get me wrong — I use SYO and like the idea for myself. Try explaining
SYO to the average Joe though. Most people have no idea what a feed is, much less OPML.

I think SYO is something that Feedburner should have done considering they already own a number of feeds.

Spot on Mike.

I think it would be great if when a user subscribed to an rss feed or podcast that it “pinged” back to to their SYO profile and updated your reading/listening list with the new item in your list.

For now I have done some little graphics to promote SYO because I really like SYO and what it could achieve. Anbody interested can grab the images at: http://www.paulmichaelsmith.co.....l_logo.php.

SYO doesn’t really look like a neutral place to me. Maybe I’ve missed what you are allowed and/or supposed to do with it, but all the footer says is ‘Copyright © 2004-2006 Scripting News, Inc. All rights reserved’ (no creative commons, no API to build apps/mashups upon it, …) so as is it seems like another walled garden which does let OPML in but only provides a few (albeit interesting) views for getting stuff out.

The term “OPML” doesn’t conjure a lot of meaning to me. I know what it is, and what it does, but I haven’t delved into it. Can I be alone?

Its not much of a surprise that you love this site, you are number one. It seems to me that each time you write a story about this site you are artifically increasing your ranking.

I wrote a post when the service came out titled 7 uses for Share your OPML http://marshallk.com/six-uses-for-share-your-opml

Like so many things these days the proof will in large part be found in the pudding, but there are some things I find it useful for already. Dynamic synching with changes made to our OPML files really is important, and partnership with Bloglines, Newsgator and others seems key. Newsgator online already has a check box to mark your OPML public or private, default being public. Not sure if they are doing anything with this yet, but it doesn’t seem a far cry. Contributing user data would be in all vendors’ best interests, I’d think, but the importance of users marking individual feeds public or private would greatly increase if sharing lists was default practice.

unless people promote feeds, your average joe isnt going to use them, thats what we need to do, promote rss!

http://www.playpacman.net

I think it’s interesting though that since I have gotten into using a feed reader I have commented less and less over the past few weeks. When they figure out how to comment directly from the feed reader then it will be really useful.

Hey Michael,

SYO may or may not have anything to do with what people are reading right now. It’s simply what a highly technical crowd says it is subscribed too. We have no idea if they read those feeds or how they value whatever it is they do read. I’m a very happy subscriber to your feed, but my interest in esoteric Silicon Valley anecdotes is irrelevant to any interesting measure of consumer intent.

RSS needs to fade back into the huge, magical mess that is the web. And, it is pleasantly starting to do so. In the same vein, explicit sharing of reading lists (i.e. OPML) is probably too much work and requires too much technical knowledge for mass adoption. Dave Winer is consistently clear that he doesn’t care if his tools reach mass adoption — that isn’t his measure of success. Look to him for standards and technology leadership, not building big consumer dotcoms. By the time a technology has reached that stage, he’s off helping us all with the next thing.

The Web2 world needs to open up our echo chamber and start acting on what people at large are actually reading, not just what heavy bloggers read and what bloggers link to. Today’s hot clicks in California are about celebrities and video games, not Javascript and wikis: http://directory.mybloglog.com/US/ca/

Scott, no you have it wrong in the last paragraph. We don’t need to open up to the masses and become interested in what they read. We need to keep banging away on new stuff and see what sticks. We are early adopters of new tech stuff and a small percentage of these projects will eventually, in some form, make their way to the masses.

We aren’t in an echo chamber…it’s ok for some people to say that, but as a leader in this space you need to keep the religion. Is Dogster non-interesting because the masses don’t know about it? Or is the fact that we, your “echo chamber” are excited about suggest that it may be something the masses may enjoy, perhaps with a few tweaks? I think its the latter, and so do you. But your comment above suggests that you think its the former.

Back to SYO, I agree that the techie stuff needs to go before it has legs. But the idea of a central repository that knows what we are all subscribed to, spitting out statistics based on that data, makes sense. It may be a behind the scenes player like weblogs.com was, but there is a real need for this.

There appears to be an obvious disconnect between Techcrunch’s original demographic and newfound demographic (resulting from Techcrunch’s increasing popularity).

Michael couldn’t have been more “on the money” with this post. There will be (is) a need to discover new and relevant feeds. The best approach to feed introduction/search is reading lists.

As for SYO and FeedCollectors, there execution could have been better and their overall product may or may not hit the bulls-eye, but there is a need for the service these products provide.

Yeah! Good point Ari. Bad Readers, bad, bad bad.

As a rabid Atom/RSS user, I just have to say that SYO is too removed from any services I actually need to be worth my time. If this was coming from Google Reader or NewsGator and was linked into syncing services or the implementation of the Attention XML spec, I would be more excited, but as a standalone vanity listing, it is worthless. I have plenty of sites in my OPML that I rarely read. In order for SYO to be accurate or useful, it need to reflect actual attention metrics like viewing and clickthrough.

Personally, I read Signal vs. Noise 7:1 over TechCrunch (which I also enjoy), but SYO would just reinforce the #1 position of Techcrunch if I added my OPML. This is not giving an accurate account of position in my mind.

“completely objective”…funny;) pro only! next.

@16 - Ken Rossi :

The problem with commenting from your feed reader relates to the inherent holes in the major blogging APIs. There is no standard way of programmatically accessing comments for a given platform.

The CommentAPI makes an attempt at doing such, but it’s far from being widely adopted. RSS Bandit supports the CommentAPI for blogs that also make use of it by the way. So you can comment from that feed reader.

> I’m thinking the very long tail of blogs
>The best approach to feed introduction/search is reading lists.

I completely disagree. It might work decent until it gets spammed. But it will. Just like general search, blog search, forums, comments, trackbacks, tags, pings, cross site scripting errors, etc etc etc.

I bet it is exceptionally easy to put legit looking co-citation into an OMPL list and randomize it to work spam blogs up toward the top. So little effort. So little relevancy. It can’t be widely adopted without becoming a spam den.

Plus I find more interesting stuff by reading in content citations from channels I already read than from looking at some of the blogs they say they read. If they read something influential and useful often then most likely that will show up in the content area of their blog, no?

Michael has a good point here. To present the feeds the reader based on his intensions. Digging the ‘Database of Intensions’; a term coined by a famous book “Search”.

I am glad to know that Michael wants some sort of Search tool that can come out of RSS feeds.

I think the upcoming flickrss.com will try to build a Social Network over RSS which will come closer to Michael’s grand vision.

Michael has a good point here. To present the feeds the reader based on his intensions. Digging the ‘Database of Intensions’; a term coined by a famous book “Search”.

I am glad to know that Michael wants some sort of Search tool that can come out of RSS feeds.

I think the upcoming flickrss. com will try to build a Social Network over RSS which will come closer to Michael’s grand vision.

Mike i totally share your analysis (to be honest i planned to launch surch a service a year ago). However something is missing. We all know a big part of a blog audience is bookmark generated. I think the ideal standard would be a combination of feed-centric stats like SYO and bookmark-stats (although i have no idea how exactly this could be measured, adding a bookmark would not be enough unless the URL bookmarked could be tracked by a regular stat engine).

That would reflect the true audience of a blog and would report an honest ranking i believe

Of couse with the time more people will use RSS and less Bookmarks but i believe a significant share will remain on bookmarks specially new internet users.

Noted it, not such a creative idea (technorati favarite), yet SYO is just a nice way for more peoples to share more. You can just grabe all what others are reading, not only just a piece of webpage (del.icio.us’s way). Summaring the feeds according to the catelogies come in the way, for people find out where they should go to, not just a bulket of OPMLs. But I think it hard for SYO making this happens, any idea for this ?

Arrington said, “We don’t need to open up to the masses and become interested in what they read. We need to keep banging away on new stuff and see what sticks…. We aren’t in an echo chamber… as a leader in this space you need to keep the religion.”

Mike,

If I am a leader here, as you kindly suggest, then it is incumbent upon to me to state that we _are_ in an Echo Chamber. It’s an incredibly pleasant place to be, but it’s an inhibitor to getting significant businesses built and broad societal progress made. Contrary to your point, my only “religion” is advancing the power and desires of my users — and as many of them as humanly possible. Innovation is a means to an end, not the point of the exercise.

I don’t know how much of the last Bust you were here for, but your statement above will contribute to the stress and anguish of many more people than you realize. Many first-time entrepreneurs now look to Techcrunch for Web2-industry context. I’m of the opinion that a measure of responsibility is coupled with that authority.

Taken literally, and that’s how I think you mean it, your quote says that people should build whatever applications they think of in the hope that enough people care. That will cause a far higher rate of startup failure than is necessary — just like the last time. The more pointless applications that are built now, the more layoffs there will be later. Market research and product marketing aren’t things that come naturally to many smart technical folks, but they are the best way to lower the risk of failure. With the success of Techcrunch, if you encourage better business practices, a reasonable number of people will listen to you.

Specifically, the problem is that many startups are building applications that ONLY innovators will ever love. It’s fine for startups to use our ivory-tower world as an early adopter segment if they have an idea of how to break out of it into a market large enough to matter economically (e.g. Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.). However, there are any number of startup people who think that getting traction with the valley insiders equals success. That’s a fine first step if you want to build a small profitable business, but under few other circumstances.

Neither Dogster nor SYO fall into the pattern that I’m worried about above. A very small percent of Dogster’s 200k+ users are valley insiders, and they have a defined market of millions to address. I sit in the Dogster office every day, and innovation for it’s own sake is completely absent. Everything they do is product marketing and customer-driven. SYO is also exempt because Dave Winer clearly tells anyone who listens that he’s _only_ interested in serving the innovators and not in building businesses. He won’t raise errant venture capital, hire a bunch of people, and then need to turn them out when the money’s gone.

One problem I think there is in bigging up SYO as being a worthy long tail list of blogs is, simply how many of those sites on a reading list are actually read often? I can imagine, say a user of FeedDemon, upping an OPML list with a bunch of pre-defined, pre-installed feeds, adding a few more, and then never coming back to them ever again. Yet the data would remain on SYO as as important as someone who avidly reads the same feed. Which is more worthy for a rank? It’s also a service ripe for spamming and influencing.

The problem is, without accurately monitoring each users reading habits, there can never be a true top list of any feeds. And by accurately monitoring each users habits, you’re invading privacy and are no better than Spyware…and “attention” malarky won’t solve that

Although it is “Walled” in that it only works on FeedBlitz’s subscriber base, FeedAdvisor.com dowes make subscriber-based metrics and suggestions for new content based on user subscriptions, not what someone has uploaded. I think that’s a core issue with SYO - you need to want to share your OPML and keep it updated. Sites like FeedAdvisor automate that. Nop upload necessary, and it’s updated in real-time as subscribers come and go - FeedAdvisor dos monitor and report aggregate (not individual) reading habits. Steve Rubel at micropersuasion talked briefly about it at http://www.micropersuasion.com....._with.html

I’m inclined to agree with the 56K population objection. Michael cannot be serious about “people may not even know they are using SYO to store their feed information.”

However, the “share my blogroll” meme has proven its fitness, and the affinity recommendations will be compelling to a number of users. Perhaps if SYO or a lookalike provided mass-market appeal through blogroll widgets, etc. Or at the very least republished as OPML so we could micropublish using Grazr or Optimal.

In short, SYO’s aggregate data is exciting to researchers and marketers, but they’ll need to provide more selfish benefit to grow the participant pool (and motivate even the 56K to keep up-to-date).

I think that there is a great amount of useful, actionable information in the comment stream on blogs. When is someone going to make it easy to search the comment streams for topical information.

One problem. I have about 5 blogs that I read almost daily, and another 5 to 10 that I read at least twice each month. But I don’t use feeds OR bookmarks. The ones that I pay attention to have enough influence for me to memorize their URLs and manually type them. I’ll bet there are many people like me who will never show up in the popularity rankings. We will never be counted in deciding what blogs would be interesting for someone who reads what we read. And that limits the usefulness of the information generated.

How do I find a blog I might want to read? Easy. It will usually be mentioned by Mark Pilgrim, Anil Dash, Sam Ruby, Dean Edwards, MiniMSFT, Groklaw, or Slashdot. Or it may mention Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Xen, Qemu, UML, Python, Ruby, Tomcat, Java, Mono, Glassfish, JOnAS, or OORexx.