BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 30, 2005, 02:36PMPhotoshop Tutorials On Google Video
Here's a happy accident: a bunch of Photoshop tutorials ready for consumption on Google Video. Searching for terms like "training" and "tutorial" will bring up all kinds of video training materials for other apps as well. Yahoo has a ton as well (but lacks the in-line player of Google Video).
Yahoo Goes Balistic on RSS
Yahoo continues to show everyone else how it's done with RSS. Beyond lighting up just about every news source and search results with RSS feeds, they've gone ahead and added RSS to their Yahoo Mail beta. But wait. There's more. They're lighting up their Yahoo Alerts (which you can get via SMS, instant message or email) with RSS. News.com has an article on all this. Very, very cool.
Yahoo is ahead of everyone else in its efforts to make the technology of RSS disappear and really just give people the benefits. When you're leveraging RSS and don't even know it (by using My Yahoo, you're effectively aggregating news sources), then you're already ahead in the game.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 29, 2005, 10:42AMQuick Tutorial : Groovy Badges in Photoshop
Bartelme Design has a neat two part tutorial on creating badges (you know, those glossy looking stickers) in Photoshop. Great looking blog too.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 28, 2005, 12:02PMProgrammable Web : Most Popular Mashups
I have nothing but deep hatred for the term "mashup." With that said, the ProgrammableWeb blog has a nice summary of the most popular mashups based on votes and visits (or something).
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 26, 2005, 04:07PMGiftbox
Now that the holiday season is upon us, here's a neat (and free) way to keep track of gifts. Giftbox is a web-based gift planner.
Google Video Updated
Google Video has gotten some tweaks of late. The home page now has a simple, two-tabbed interface (Popular & Random). You can also now play search results back to back in a single film (rather than clicking on each one).
In related news, any Family Guy fan knows it's all about those little flashback moments of idiocy that make it funny. Well, it turns out Google Video is a great way to catch them.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 25, 2005, 05:17PMWho's Afraid of Google? Everyone
I'm all about the Google conspiracy theories. Never trust a company that uses primary colors, has a slogan like "Do No Evil," and it's market cap is north of $125 billion.
Wired has a nice little summary of the various Google initiatives (i.e. schemes) in play today.
Before we know it, Google will be indexing and generating revenue from things like Friendship and Understanding.
New Elsewhere Links RSS Feed
Those delicious bite-size morsels of linkage - the Elsewhere links, are now available in their own feed (in case you'd rather just get the links without my long-winded ramblings). The main feed still contains a mix of my entries along with the elsewhere links.
You'll find links to both feeds at the top of the menu options on Basement.org's main home page.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 24, 2005, 11:06AMDang. Basement.org Got Dugged
I'm not sure of the proper verb. Dugg? Digged? Diggied? Dug up? But the Rounded Corners entry from a couple of days ago definitely caught fire (relatively speaking) on the Blogosphere.
Some statistics (as of this posting): The entry was dugg 1280 times; it's been tagged on del.icio.us over 170 times; and, get this, the web log shows the page was hit over 30,000 times. Scary.
It was actually a lot of fun to watch it spread around. I think once it ended up on Digg's front page, it just took off from there. I think the entry itself touched a curiosity about how design, psychology, fashion, etc. affect how we see things. If you haven't caught up on the comment thread, don't miss it. The article itself pales in comparison. Some really interesting thoughts there.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 22, 2005, 12:33PMWhy Do We Love Rounded Corners?
As interface and graphic designers, we border on obsessed with rounded corners. Web developers have gone to great lengths, through the creative use of CSS (and sometimes Javascript) to make the creation of rounded corners as painless as possible. The proposed CSS3 specification even includes properties for rounded corners (Firefox already supports it).
So why is there such a fascination with rounded corners? I would venture that our attraction to rounded corners goes beyond the aesthetic and speaks to something more.
On one level, I think we're attracted to things that appear to be organic in nature. Take the iPod for instance. While the industrial design of similar products clearly hints towards how the device came to be, Apple put a lot of effort into creating a device that feels more like it grew on a tree than assembled in a factory. They went to great pains to conceal the machine-like characteristics that would typically hold a device together (screws, etc.). The result is a smoother feel with very few edges or hard angles to be found. This "smoothness" not only speaks to usability but also fosters an emotional connection with the device. Some of our earliest memories are tied to objects and things that are far less than perfect and rife with right angles. Corners say "go away." At the risk of sounding hoaky: smoother, rounder surfaces say "hold me."
Beyond physical objects, there is also appeal to presenting information and the controls around information in a more organic context than just boxes and right angles. When we're introduced with a complex set of information, especially a set that is unfamiliar to us, one of the first things we do is survey the information and apply context wherever we can. "This bundle of information is associated with that title. This group of buttons over there is clearly associated with that piece of information." Etc.
As information architects and interaction designers, much of our work involves helping users make sense of the information and controls in front of them. In other words, we provide them with visual hints that guide them along the process of applying context to the interface in front of them. Rounded corners are a great way to do just that. Unlike plain old boxes with right angles, rounded corners clearly hint to what is inside ofand part of this cluster of information and what isn't. When designers use solid colors it adds another level of reinforcement of context: the illusion of weight and volume.
Both explanations I've laid out above have one common denominator: they appear to leverage our own, very basic understanding of how we interact with and use objects in the physical world. The world is comprised of discrete objects that have their own integrity and are clearly separate from everything else (a beach ball, for example, is clearly its own thing not tied to anything else). Some objects even have controls on them that allow you to manipulate them. The knobs on your toaster, by virtue of being attached to your toaster, clearly control the toaster and not your refrigerator.
Rounded corners speak to and leverage this basic "expertise" we all possess and use to interact with the world around us. I'm pretty convinced that the appeal is beyond aesthetic. When used judiciously, we can create more intuitve experiences through such devices.
This article is based partly on a paper I wrote called Information Objects. For anyone who's interested, It's availabe in PDF format for download.
Update: A related article has recently been posted that explores the use of open space in visual design.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 21, 2005, 11:45AMRSS & PDA's
The choices for viewing feesd on PDA's has been pretty narrow to date. It's too bad really, since RSS and PDA's are a great marriage for syncing up and catching up to content. Here's a nice little summary of the options out there.
Javascript Syntax Highlighter
A really slick Javascript syntax highlighter that takes your textarea code and makes it all perty. Supports a bunch of languages.
RSS MAD
RSS Mad is being touted as "the largest archive of RSS feeds on the internet." Not sure how true that is, but still worth lookiing at.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 20, 2005, 12:24PMScript.aculo.us Updated
One of the tastiest Javascript libraries around - Script.aculo.us - has recently been updated to version 1.5 rc5.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 17, 2005, 10:22AMThe Usability of API's
As experience designers, we constantly tout the virtues of paying attention to users and creating thoughtfully designed interfaces. This philosophy not only applies to laymen end-users but for the development world as well. With Google Base, Google establishes RSS as the preferred delivery mechanism to getting your content en masse into Google Base.
Bill Burnham sums it up well:
At its highest level, Google's adoption of RSS represents a further triumph of REST-based SOA architectures over the traditional RPC architecture being advanced by many software vendors. Once again, short and simple wins over long and complex.
Simplicity - whether applied to the development community or the general user community - is a virtue.
Flickr Color Pickr
Krazy Dad's Flicr Color Pickr is an insanely cool Flash app that grabs Flickr photos that correspond to a selected color.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 16, 2005, 01:30PMGoogle Base And The Incidental Semantic Web
So the Web is all abuzz about Google Base so I figured I'd chime in (because you know, the world needs one more opinion on this thing).
Beyond my own (admittedly fun) conspiracy theories about Google in general, you have to give Google credit for trying to package up and introduce an extremely abstract idea - the Semantic Web - to the masses.
If we can take off our Techie hats for a second and step into the mind of the average web user, a first visit to Google Base would probably result in a "what the hell am I supposed to do with this?" Is it classifieds? Is it a place to store my lists? Is it some sort of publishing tool?
This ambiguity and lack of definition, or more importantly, lack of clear purpose for end users, will be Google Base's (or any attempt to create a semantically-centric platform) biggest challenge. They try to narrow your options by providing an initial set of categories, but that may well cause more confusion than provide clarity. "What do vehicles have to do with recipes?"
Now, this barrier to entry isn't just me bitching about adoption. I think what Google's trying to do here is in the spirit of social platforms like del.icio.us and Flickr, that is, creating incidentally valuable information by people's ordinary usage of a service.
We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how our tags will help the larger population. We just do it because it makes our own lives easier. The fact that a "greater good" evolves out of our collective behavior is a happy accident. The challenge for Google Base is making certain that a recognizable and narrow goal is there for users to see and that the actions users take will benefit this larger semantic picture that Google is trying to draw.
The real Holy Grail here is to build a rich semantic web that materializes as a byproduct of an experience that is cleary understood and reinforces and rewards ceratin behaviors. The semantic web is all about making signal out of noise. Google Base is ambitious in that it is an attempt to start taking us down some sort of path towards a semantic web. Now we'll have to see if the masses do their part.
Google & Flash : A Torrid Affair
I was playing with Google Analytics and I noticed that Google has decided to bed down with Flash yet again. A couple of months ago, Google took the plunge and switched over to Flash to deliver video. You can't fault Google for the decision. It's pretty slick stuff.
You have to think Google is just foaming at the mouth as we all recklessly head towards the "rich web as a platform" path. If you dig around Analytics with its visual charts and maps, you can quickly see that it would have been a nightmare to implement in AJAX. Good for Adobe. Potentially uncomfortable for the likes of Google.
Yahoo! Debutes RSS Advertising
The inevitable has happened - Yahoo!, who's just been awesome with their RSS initiatives - has debuted advertising for RSS feeds.
I understand why, but...blech.
Can we "opt out" of such things? Maybe we can get Nick Bradbury to add "Filter Feeds" feature to FeedDemon? Would that be wrong? Is it wrong to ask? Too many questions...
The Great Microsoft Decoy
I’m sure everyone’s heard about the now infamous, leaked (*cough*) Microsoft memos. At first glance, it’s a huge validation and a victory for grassroots, platform-agnostic development. Microsoft is actually worried about being perceived as irrelevent by this wave of application “services” that are rendering the buy/download/install/update model archaic.
Soon after Mark Lucovsky jumped ship from Microsoft to Google, he wrote a well known post about how Microsoft has forgotten how to ship software. It may not have resonated then, but it sure as hell is resonating now.
Are we really headed for an advertising-driven world where you just “visit” applications hosted on different URL’s? Are the days of shrink-wrapped CD-ROM software coming to an end? Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff seems to think so. The status quo, according to many, is about to face a very serious challenge.
Digging a bit deeper though, I can’t help but be a bit skeptical about the true sincerity of these memos. I do think Microsoft has work to do to re-establish themselves as a player in a newly-formed space. It’s a perception problem, and they can fix that. Just as they positioned themselves to battle Netscape years ago, they’re being asked to rally the troops yet again.
When Netscape posed a “threat” to Microsoft, they shifted a massive number of resources and relentlessly focused on Internet Explorer. Eventually, IE actually became a better browser. More importantly, it was free. It helped Microsoft re-establish itself as a viable player. But IE was just a means to an end. All the while, their real cash cows were making…cash: Office, SQL and other server products, and of course, their operating systems.
And now, the alarms have been sounded again. According to Gates and Ozzie, Microsoft is about to be challenged yet again and they need to reinvent themselves yet again.
Or do they?
Looking back on the Netscape battle, Microsoft didn’t reinvent itself at all. It simply responded to a perceived threat, crushed them, and then returned to business as usual: making licensed software. IE never showed up on their bottom line. It was a means to an end. It enhanced perception and provided upsell (sort of) to the real money makers.
The story today is that their actual core business, licensed platform and application software, is being threatened by this wave of ad-supported services sent over the wire.
I’m just not buying it. Here’s why:
- “Who Said I Want To Download A Word Processor?” The real tangible value of delivering applications over the web, beyond the “wow” factor, is actually pretty limited. While it’s cool to play with a word processor-like application in a browser, it’s real value isn’t in how it was delivered. Once you “download” that applicaton, how often is it going to change? Not very often. While installing an Office suite is a bit annoying, you only do it once. The real value lies in where your data is stored - centrally. A rich application to consume that data, while cool to have delivered seamlessly over the web, isn’t that big of a deal. FeedDemon is a great example of this marriage. It’s a Windows application that syncs up with Newsgator services to keep your feeds’ status (read, unread, etc.) intact no matter where you are. The sweet spot is rich, client applications nicely wired to services. And rest assured, Microsoft is going to make sure it nails this one.
- “My Desktop Looks Like Times Square.” Would you tolerate ads on your desktop? On your spreadsheet application? On your word processor? Even on your chat client? I wouldn’t. I’m ok with ads living in a browser and out of my life. As desktops and devices
become directly wired to services, the need to go to a URL in a browser to do things is going to diminish. The URL Destination as we know it is going to become less relevant. As it should. We can create more seamless experiences if we can inject data into the right places rather than just the browser. But where do the ads go? - “My Stuff Is Stored Where?” While few would doubt the convenience of having your data centrally stored, many will not tolerate it. For businesses that value their data, that option simply isn’t viable (and an enormous chunk of Microsoft’s revenue comes from those businesses). Beyond where it’s stored, the notion that this data will be combed over so a service provider can generate relevant ads is a bit…well…creepy.
- “Um, enough with the maps mash-ups already” I like maps. I like how they zoom and stuff. Google Maps is great. Yahoo Maps is even better. And people are doing some pretty cool things with them. But let’s relax ourselves folks. Beyond the fun/geek factor, what are we supposed to do with all this? I commute from home to work in New York City. I can only stare at the bus schedule in Vancouver for so long before I conclude “Ok. Now what.” What other “mash-ups” are out there that don’t have anything to do with maps? Even more importantly, how are they useful to the general user population (and no, that doesn’t include people who go to Foo Camps and Bar Camps and Hyper Camps).
Looking back on the memos, I can’t help but feel that Microsoft is snickering at us as it joins this party. They know the difference between hype and making money. They also know the value of making sure they are never perceived as becoming irrelevent. One thing Microsoft knows how to do well is adapt.
Beyond Microsoft though, I think it’s important for the community in general to stay focused on what reallv matters: creating rich, intuitive experiences that are less about technology and more about delivering value. We’ve stumbled on a great set of tools in our hands to do some awesome things. Let’s not screw it up (and that goes for you too Microsoft).
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 9, 2005, 01:27PMBlogjet
I’d like to plug a great little Windows platform blogging tool called Blogjet. It’s a simple, word processing-style application that allows you to publish and manage posts. It’s a bit on the pricey side at $39.95, but worth the money if you’re a serious blogger.
del.icio.us / search
The del.icio.us blog lays out it's new search capability.
Microsoft & Oracle Give Away Their Stuff
Microsoft is giving away Express editions of their Visual Studio 2005 software. Oracle is giving away the express edition of their Oracle 10g Database.
I think the big boys are watching a lot of buzz get created with free tools and they want in on the party. Free up the API's, give away the tools, and let everyone have at it.
I think what open source was missing for so long was a good, strong coordinated marketing message. Maybe blogging, as a sort of "organic marketing," fills that void. One thing's for sure, the big boys are listening.
Windows Live Now Supports Firefox
Windows Live, the bastard child of Start.com, now supports Firefox. I'm gonna give this a crack as my browser homepage. We'll see how it goes.
Vectors For Flash
Vectors For Flash is an excellent set of tutorials that teach fundamental vector math and how to apply it to Flash Actionscript.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 7, 2005, 09:43AM
Google Local For Mobile Now Available
Google has taken yet another step towards permeating your whole life. Their Local/Maps products are now available for mobile phones. It's got a neat little wizard to get you going.
We are one step closer to Google knowing who you are, how you behave, where you are, what you want to do next, and feeding ads directly into your brain.
Yippee. (I think).
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 6, 2005, 01:35PM
Blog Spammers Are Extremely Supportive People
I’ve come to terms with comment spam on basement.org. I’m too lazy/busy to upgrade Movable Type. So every few weeks, I clean out all those nonsensical comments that point to Viagra ads and the like.
I did notice one thing as I was cleaning them up today: the comments are often very supportive and some times inspirational. Some snippets:
- Your site is a very nice source of info.
- You're doing a great work here. I enjoyed visiting here very much. Thanks!
- Very nice site. Please keep updating it.
- Nice site!
Now, I’ll spare you the fact that the above are linked to sites like http://size-genetics.penis-products.info/ (I’ll also spare you a clickable link). Regardless, I’ve chosen to blindly accept these little boosts to my self-esteem. I will look past their hidden (or not-so-hidden) agendas. As I delete them for all time from Movable Type, I will not shove them out the door. Instead, I’ll kindly show them out.
“This way sir.”
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 4, 2005, 03:52PM"Uh Oh. Your Browser Is Leaking"
I've blogged in the past about how the browser will become less and less relevant as your primary portal to information that is not stored on your computer. A whole slew of technologies are readying us for the ability to get information in a more targeted and painless fashion. From Mozilla's XUL which lights up the chrome on Firefox to products like Konfabulator and Dashboard that allow for smaller-sized "widgets," there's a concerted attempt to rely less and less on the browser.
I think the success of such a push relies on a few things, and one of them is how seamlessly these widgets get to your desktop. Right now, downloads like Konfabulator and Google Desktop require a download and install (8MB and 5MB respectively).
For this to happen on a large scale, the steps to getting there needs to get a lot easier. My mother may love my Konfabulator weather widget, but if I left her to rely on herself to get it on her desktop, it would never happen. Why? It requires the download and installation of Konfabulator first. Then the user is expected to go back to the Konfabulator site, find the desired Widget and finally download and install it. Just as the RSS experience is broken (it's jumble of XML to most), this process is completely non-sensical to the average user. This is partly why there is a lot of oohing and ahhing at AJAX these days. To experience it, all you had to do was visit a web page.
In my opinion, the player that eliminates or greatly reduces that barrier is the one who wins. There are two players that can totally nail this one: Microsoft and Adobe. Microsoft because they hold the cards on the buttons and levers that make the operating system work and are best positioned to light up your desktop in a frictionless way.
Adobe has the famously lightweight Flash player. Despite it's compactness, the Flash player is pitched and perceived as a browser add-on. That needs to go away. The step of getting functionality (or grouping of functionality) to your desktop should be simple and seamless. Of course, not all content and features make sense, but a lot does. Imagine visiting My Yahoo! and selectively dragging the widgets you value most right to your desktop. Very sweet.
With Flex, Adobe has a great starting point. The notion of containers and canvases can prove to be an ideal demarcation point for developers to allow the "detachment" of certain components from the larger canvas. I admit I don't know the technical challenges at play here, but I can't imagine them being insurmountable.
More broadly speaking, we're heading in a good direction from a user experience perspective. Today, information is relegated an siloed in your browser. You go someplace to get what you need and then come back to your workspace. Beyond weather widgets and headlines on your desktop, we need to shoot for intruding into real workflows with pertinent information. That's where a lot of untapped power lies. Now it's up to some of the big players to make that leap a more seamless one.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 3, 2005, 06:14PM
Adobe: Bring Back Central (Sort Of)
There's clearly interest in tapping into data from within widgets that exist outside of the browser. Microsoft has Gadgets. Apple has Dashboard. Yahoo has Konfabulator.
I just installed Yahoo!'s Konfabulator. 8.8 Megs. Big and bloated compared to Flash. Central was an attempt to break Flash out of the browser, and for whatever reason, never took off. Adobe needs to revisit this. Make it light to install (a plugin for the Flash plugin?) and make it easy as hell to create toys via either Flash or Flex for the desktop.
Even better, give me a "Peel" icon on anything Flash. I click it, it peels right off the browser and lands on my desktop. Hell yeh.
'Microsoft Live Folders' Anyone?
Microsoft is poised to tack on the word "Live" to anything that moves for awhile. Can we turn any folder into a "live" folder that syncs up centrally no matter where we go? Why the hell not. Microsoft just acquired FolderShare. Grab some technology, hand it over to the marketing/branding folks and, voila: Microsoft Product!
Yahoo! Maps Beta Debuts - In Flash
This is probably the best validation of Flash as a serious alternative to AJAX to date. Yahoo! Maps Beta has debuted and it is in Flash. There is also an AJAX version for the .0001% of people who don’t have Flash installed.
But wait, it gets even better. If you’re a Flex freak (and we know you’re out there), there’s an API just for you. Very, very cool. Across the board, Yahoo! went ballistic, delivering five API’s in total. Three Flash variations, the old simple API and AJAX. You can mix it up any way you like. A lot of people already have.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 2, 2005, 03:08PMMicrosoft Comes Alive With Live
Man, Microsoft does not like to be left out of the party. In classic fashion, they have re-jigged, re-orged, and come back at the Web 2.0 story with what appears to be a vengeance.
A lot of stuff was announced yesterday. Some of it was hype, but you can't ignore the story. Some points:
- Most of the announcements are really just rebrandings of current products. Hotmail is going to become Live Mail. MSN Messenger becomes Live IM. Start.com transforms into Live.com. And the list goes on. Google is riding some incredible brand buzz right now and much of it is just hype. This is a healthy refresh for Microsoft because it sort of reintroduces a lot of what is already there.
- What do we really want out of the Web? I think the whole AJAX trend feels nice right now, but it's staying power is going to be tested. The browser is going to feel claustrophobic once Microsoft gets done with us. The real sweet spot is data everywhere (especially persoanlized data) and rich, dynamic applications to control them. Who cares that the interface came in over the wire or not?
- Don't be fooled into thinking this is the end of Office. Office is, at it's core, a business platform. Large enterprises are not interested in having their intelligence hosted elsewhere. Microsoft is betting that hosted, rich applications are a niche market. I think they're right.
- Microsoft is one of the few companies in the world that can earmark money just to wear you down. It is amazing to see how many initiatives are planned:
- Microsoft Sparkle (competitor to Flash)
- Microsoft Gadgets
- XAML (XML-based markup for Windows Vista)
- Microsoft Live
- Microsoft knows that a key to their success is to draw users away from the browser and back to the desktop. We're going to see many traditionally desktop elements "lit up" with data coming over the wire. In my opinion, this is the real killer. It can drastically improve a user's experience (i.e. "I don't have to go over there to get a piece of information.") and at the same time diluting the value of the Web Destination. Over time, this will render traditional web destinations less relevant. If search becomes a desktop widget, where will Google (or anyone else for that matter) put their ads? "Why do I have to go to Google.com to search? I'd rather just do it here, in my application."
IE Developer Toolbar Refreshed
The IE team keeps on churning. They've refreshed the IE Developer Toolbar with a bunch of fixes and some new features. The release notes are here.
Microsoft's del.icio.us: Windows Live Favorites
Windows Live Favorites also quietly debuted. It’s essentially remote storage of your Windows favorites a la del.icio.us.
Microsoft Debuts(?) Live.com
Timed to coincide with Microsoft’s Microsoft Live announcement yesterday, Live.com debuted. It’s essentially start.com rebranded to fit into the “Live” branding. What’s weird is that while start.com supports Firefox pretty extensively, live.com does not – only promising a “Firefox support coming soon.” Regardless, it’s also not fully working. I couldn’t import my OPML feed into it (whereas I can with start.com).
I’m gonna write some more on Microsoft’s announcements later. For now, take a look at Ideas.live.com to get a sense of where things are going.
Posted by Richard Ziade on November 1, 2005, 02:57PM
RSS = Absence of Expression
A while back, I remember some discussion arose about how feed readers and RSS sort of render visual design obsolete. The reason is obvious: If you're tracking blogs and news sources through a feed reader of some sort, it's only pulling the content. The only hint of distinctiveness is the optional header graphic offered up by the RSS 2.0 spec.
Over time, I've become increasingly reliant on my feed reader. My feed reader of choice is Newsgator's excellent FeedDemon. FeedDemon allows for a whole slew of ways to view and scan feeds. Newspapers, Outlook-style headers, and the like. It's all offered up to optimize your feed scanning abilities. Way back when, Scoble even noted that the absence of presentation is actually a benefit to feed reading (i.e. All headlines look exactly the same).
While this all may be true, I'm finding that this sort of "direct input" way of getting information is feeling increasingly sterile and disconnected. Like it or not, we are not machines that only process data. The layout, color and style of a site is not only created for usability and readabilty, but to evoke a certain mood or emotion. After all, these "sources" of information are often people with a desire to get something about themselves across beyond just pure information.
We talk about RSS today in the context of boosting productivity and increasing the exposure of sites. I'm the first to extol the virtues of RSS. But I think something is lost in the leap to pure information consumption. It's a bit ironic that with the elevation of the individual publisher as a new voice on the Internet comes a stripping of their own personal style and expression.