Thinking about WP.com's aggregations/discovery features
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianI don't use WP.com much now, except for as an archive/testing site, because I prefer having my own site on my own domain. However, it is interesting to see what things they've implemented within the site for managing inter-blog interactions.
Tag Surfer: allows you to subscribe to a tag, sitewide. WP.com's implementation of tags I find irritating, because when you click on a tag, you instead get the global tag stream instead of posts on the blog tagged with that tag. However, the idea of a global tag stream is one w/ great potential.
Blog Surfer: This allows you to subscribe to WP.com blogs, which appear as an aggregated feed, including private blogs which do not have RSS feeds. So vaguely like an LJ-style friends list, except sans external feeds. I'm not sure, though, how far it can go. There's an option for "posts since last login," though.
Readomattic: Confusingly, this seems to be partially an alternate way of accessing Blog Surfer (or Friend Surfer: they seem to be confused about the terminology). However, you can also view, or subscribe to, categories of top Wordpress posts, tags (confusingly overlapping with Tag Surfer), and twitter. Twitter? I don't really get why I would want to subscribe to Twitter via WP.com, but now I can.
Except for the ability to view private blogs, I'm not sure how Readomattic/BlogSurfer is superior to simply using my own RSS reader, except that it's faster. At least if I wanted to view something like the "top business posts" vertical, though, they allow me to block posts from blogs I don't like. I wonder if private blogging on WP.com really is that popular. Since the blogs are so invisible, I have no way of knowing.
Anyway, I think that WP.com's Dashboard aggregation options are fairly weak. As for regular old Wordpress, there really isn't reading aggregation available, although you can put RSS in your sidebar, because that's not the focus of the application. I tried Gregarius, but wasn't that satisfied with it because of the long loading times, although it does do authenticated feeds.
Interestingly, on the WP 2.8 beta, they note they overhauled the LJ importer. Are they really that interested in getting the LJ audience? Hmm. Must say that there is still nothing that really approximates the sort of privacy LJ has, combined with the aggregation of the private content, as well as, crucially, the invisibility of the private content (to a certain extent; in some ways LJ doesn't do this).
One thing LJ does well is make the friends-locked posts an "unknown unknown." (mostly: exceptions include the stats in the profile XD ) Er, I mean, like a certain former Defense Secretary said, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. A known unknown is when I may not be able to see what is on page X, but I know it exists. An unknown unknown is totally invisible. On out-of-the-box WP, I can make posts public, private, or password protected. In some ways, password protection is nice because, although somewhat more inconvenient for the user, it means that users don't have to register, and you don't face the problem where you don't want to friend someone, because you don't want to allow them to see ALL of your default friends-locked posts, but you do want them to see what's on a certain filter; also, friending/granting access to someone presumes a social link, and there is a limit on how many you can friend/grant access. Passwording allows you to get rid of both of those problems. However, a password protected post can be seen by the general public. They can see that "enter password" box. So, it is an "known unknown." So I'm not sure how much a passwording feature would be used if it became available. I think more than replace locking, it would acquire its own uses, such as people using it for an extra layer of security against search engines, people using it to play elaborate games, etc.
Tag Surfer: allows you to subscribe to a tag, sitewide. WP.com's implementation of tags I find irritating, because when you click on a tag, you instead get the global tag stream instead of posts on the blog tagged with that tag. However, the idea of a global tag stream is one w/ great potential.
Blog Surfer: This allows you to subscribe to WP.com blogs, which appear as an aggregated feed, including private blogs which do not have RSS feeds. So vaguely like an LJ-style friends list, except sans external feeds. I'm not sure, though, how far it can go. There's an option for "posts since last login," though.
Readomattic: Confusingly, this seems to be partially an alternate way of accessing Blog Surfer (or Friend Surfer: they seem to be confused about the terminology). However, you can also view, or subscribe to, categories of top Wordpress posts, tags (confusingly overlapping with Tag Surfer), and twitter. Twitter? I don't really get why I would want to subscribe to Twitter via WP.com, but now I can.
Except for the ability to view private blogs, I'm not sure how Readomattic/BlogSurfer is superior to simply using my own RSS reader, except that it's faster. At least if I wanted to view something like the "top business posts" vertical, though, they allow me to block posts from blogs I don't like. I wonder if private blogging on WP.com really is that popular. Since the blogs are so invisible, I have no way of knowing.
Anyway, I think that WP.com's Dashboard aggregation options are fairly weak. As for regular old Wordpress, there really isn't reading aggregation available, although you can put RSS in your sidebar, because that's not the focus of the application. I tried Gregarius, but wasn't that satisfied with it because of the long loading times, although it does do authenticated feeds.
Interestingly, on the WP 2.8 beta, they note they overhauled the LJ importer. Are they really that interested in getting the LJ audience? Hmm. Must say that there is still nothing that really approximates the sort of privacy LJ has, combined with the aggregation of the private content, as well as, crucially, the invisibility of the private content (to a certain extent; in some ways LJ doesn't do this).
One thing LJ does well is make the friends-locked posts an "unknown unknown." (mostly: exceptions include the stats in the profile XD ) Er, I mean, like a certain former Defense Secretary said, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. A known unknown is when I may not be able to see what is on page X, but I know it exists. An unknown unknown is totally invisible. On out-of-the-box WP, I can make posts public, private, or password protected. In some ways, password protection is nice because, although somewhat more inconvenient for the user, it means that users don't have to register, and you don't face the problem where you don't want to friend someone, because you don't want to allow them to see ALL of your default friends-locked posts, but you do want them to see what's on a certain filter; also, friending/granting access to someone presumes a social link, and there is a limit on how many you can friend/grant access. Passwording allows you to get rid of both of those problems. However, a password protected post can be seen by the general public. They can see that "enter password" box. So, it is an "known unknown." So I'm not sure how much a passwording feature would be used if it became available. I think more than replace locking, it would acquire its own uses, such as people using it for an extra layer of security against search engines, people using it to play elaborate games, etc.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-20 01:31 am (UTC)I'm actually not really sure that any site would be a twitter rival if it were not providing the exact same service. The current paradigm seems to be hyperintegration and free importing of streams.