What flavor of Stone Soup is Twine

I have been playing with Twine for a little while now. Some aspects I really like but there are one or two things that puzzle me, and one or two that I am not sure about. I think the twines themselves have potential, I have slowly started building up one that I hope will be a good way to share some resources, particularly when Twine goes public. I am sure that some will think that the aspects that bother me are simply down to not knowing enough about how Twine works, or more likely because I am not using Twine enough yet. This "not using Twine enough" is the thing that bothers me most, the mantra used to answer criticisms of Twine is that "the more you use it, the more you get out of it". Well that seems reasonable but I also think that a cutting edge semantic web app. should do some things almost from the get go.

There is the story of the stone soup, it doesn't really matter if you don't know it and don't wish to read the Wikipedia entry, hopefully my point will still make sense. Is it that the flavor of the Twine soup is mainly derived from all the ingredients that are added to it by the users. A cunning but relatively simple starting framework could attract a critical mass of interaction and this mass then be used to develop a semantic application. Of course you need content to be added and categorized at some level, but once you have content why does it seemingly require a lot of activity to guess what kind of new content a user may be interested in.

My best example so far is a story on Mandarin immersion learning , here are the things that Twine could know.

1. I have created one twine so far, it is tagged with mandarin


2. I have posted a high percentage of items tagged with mandarin


3. I have read a number of other items tagged with mandarin and shared one or two to other twines


4. I have conducted a search for mandarin


5. I have pulled an RSS feed against the mandarin tag search


6. The mandarin tag is relatively rarely used on twine

Yet when a new item is bookmarked on Twine and has a mandarin tag, I am not alerted. Given all the information above and not withstanding any smart programming that may be monitoring my activity across twines or connections I cannot imagine not picking up on at least enough of the low hanging fruit above to alert me somehow on the item. In fact if I had been involved with the programming I would have a red face at this point because Twine is touted to be smart etc. There is a remote possibility that I missed something I suppose but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to discover or tell me of the important fact, also the twine where the article appeared wouldn't normally hold my interest enough to make it worthwhile subscribing to it, so the standard Twinerian approach of subscribing to a huge number of twines wouldn't have helped either

There are a number of other things I am looking into that worry me. There is a "bug" where if you post a bookmark that is already in Twine you get duplicated items, even if you post to the same Twine. Putting on my programmers hat this is more than a bug, unless I am mistaken it seems that the url of a bookmark is its unique identifier, this should be enforced at the back-end and unit-tested, not allowed to bubble through to the user interface. Other opportunities to cut down on information clutter have been missed for example my Twine digest email informs me of items I have posted myself.

What I have at the moment to discover things I may be interested in a marvelous hack-up of RSS feeds, pumped and tweaked and combined through Google Reader, Netvibes and now increasing Yahoo pipes. This chaotic system has the amazing ability to (assuming I apply a little regular maintenance and tweaking) to supply me with a pretty good overall picture of things I may be interested in. Now I am increasingly adding Yahoo pipes to the mix I can see another big step-up in the ability of my ad-hoc distributed tangle to serve this purpose. In fact if you didn't know how it worked you could even be mistaken for thinking the system I am using has some kind of intelligence (Yahoo pipes probably being the major potential contributor here).

Twine is a useful social repository to drop information into, they have convinced me of that, also it is supposed to automatically tag things (well sometimes), why haven't the simple quick wins to link people with interesting information been picked up on, especially when I can get so much mileage from tweaking and manipulating RSS feeds from disparate sources all over the Internet? The recommendations that are supposed to kick in once Twine has learned enough about me haven't show me anything yet. My experiment is going to be to see if I can get more interesting and relevant content to read from Twine simply by the manipulation of its many RSS feeds (and become a Yahoo pipes power-user at the same time ;)). At the moment I am betting on my system to win, to be fair I am interacting with Twine in a manner that should help their recommendation system, but not as fast as some (anyway a system that only works for power-users is not a mainstream system at all).

As it happens a helpful Twine user called Twain (thank you twain) told me about the Mandarin post in a reply to a comment on an unrelated thread, which was nice, even though I was already aware of it. This however does not count as Twine informing me of it.

Ultimately the stone soup story can be interpreted in a number of different ways, with both a positive and negative slant, lets hope the Twine story has a happy ending.

BBC go full fat RSS

Just a quick YAAAYY. Due to pressure from some of their users, more BBC RSS is full feed. As I have said before I much, much prefer full feeds.

More on fullness of RSS

A while ago I posted in a very general way about some advantages of full RSS feeds. Since that time I have continued to use RSS extensively and thought about it a little more, there are of course various degrees of fullness.

One of the most useless feeds I have comes from a Chinese site, translated into English the title of the page the feed comes from is "Everyday English". Each time a new article is published it appears in my feed-readers with the title "Everyday English" and the text "Everyday English" that links through to the article. I have no way of knowing whether it is worth my while going to the article, each RSS item in my reader is identical.

At the other end of the spectrum would be the blog feeds where I can read the entire article in a feed-reader, inclusive of any included media files, the only reason to actually go to the site in question would be to read or leave comments.

In between there is a sliding scale, descriptive titles, snippets or abstracts included etc. etc. The bottom line seems to be I don't care how it works so long as I minimize time spent wasted going via links and finding I am not interested in what is at the other end. If I don't find my-self wasting time this way it is surprising how much information I can sift through and select from,  every time I have to follow a duff lead though feels like a huge drag (probably way out of proportion to the time wasted but that is human nature). A feed that commits the double crime of not having a high enough density of compelling content and wasting too much time gets deleted.

Sometimes the outcome can be surprising, I had a number of feeds that produced very little of interest but sometimes the odd gem. Usually there was enough information in the title or link to spot something of interest. I decided that they were not worth close monitoring but occasionally I have time I might look to see what is floating on top there. A bunch of these types of feeds can be seen on my Netvibes potluck page.

Sometimes I use Google Reader on my phone via the Opera mini browser, it is very efficient so long as I don't waste time following links to destinations that have nothing of interest.

I guess content providers often want me on their sites but, what kind of mood do they want me to be in when I get there. The challenge would seem to be in giving me other compelling reasons to visit.

My final observation is that the usefulness of an RSS feed depends on the type of content and how I interact with/use it, I can only determine this over time and by having some interest in the content. So I suppose if you produce RSS it would be a good idea to get feed-back from people that meet these same criteria.

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Using Google to buffer and/or archive RSS

I have ended up using both Google Reader and Netvibes to monitor RSS feeds. Google Reader is great for long-term stuff whereas Netvibes is great for monitoring what has changed recently. Netvibes also offers other functionality that I find more useful than iGoogle for generating an online desktop.

Whilst learning Chinese I have found a number of things I can monitor by RSS that yield a high number of results, many of which are of no interest but there are the occasional gems. I tend to call these type of feeds "potluck" If I have time I can always trawl through them quickly and see if there is anything that interests me. One type of feed that can yield the occasional gem via online link tagging services, just monitoring the del.icio.us tag for "chinese" for example can sometimes give me useful new resources. Recently I started experimenting with the public universes offered by Netvibes. I also thought it would be useful to carry out the same sort of monitoring at simpy.com and ma.gnolia.com sadly I discovered that like many other online services, simply and ma.gnolia just do not provide good reliable real-time RSS feeds. The result was that many times my Netvibes boxes were empty. The easiest and most elegant solution to this kind of problem was simply to ensure that those kinds of feed were collected by Google Reader and then I made the RSS public from Google Reader. Now when I look at those feeds in Netvibes they are coming from Google Reader and whilst they may not be completely up to date they are never empty (Google Reader caches the information). Of course I can also combines feed and publish them as one from Google Reader.

Thanks to the new public Netvibes service I can make some of my "pot luck" feeds public, which acts as a nice way to demonstrate how this kind of RSS usage

As an aside I have often noticed that many of the less mainstream services are not consistent with the performance of RSS feeds (and searching). At the moment I wouldn't switch from del.icio.us to an alternative simply because nothing else I have looked at is anywhere near so reliable.

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Email is not dead, it just smells like it.

Sometimes I think to myself there is little difference between Email and RSS (or I imagine ways in which I could manage my email in a way that might still make it marginally useful), I always come back to my senses though. Email is always going to be there and there is going to be a long tail of declining useage but I really try to interact with it as little as possible.

The real problem is seen in the use of email for communication in projects, both inside and outside of work. It really takes a lot of effort to manage email in a useful way, when discussions get multi-threaded and emails are copied, replied to, forwarded etc. etc. communication breaks down. Then of course there is the disaster that occurs when someone forgets to "copy in" someone else.

I was recently involved in a non-work project that involved communication by email and has now switched to use Basecamp already it is like a breath of fresh air.

Of course you need more than RSS to replace everything people do with Email, and elements of email can only look anything like RSS if you squint at it from a distance when very tired and forget to use one hemisphere of your brain.

Here is a tip, if someone at work sends you an urgent email, then try to ignore it for at least a day, If someone comes and actually talks to you help them as fast as you can, you can train them if you are persistent enough.

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RSS and tagging working together

A number of things prompted this post, the main catalyst was a question that came up at work and which I hope to provide and answer: Why would somebody want an RSS feed of their (article) tags?. I hope I can at least answer why they might

Partly it was also something I read on ReadWriteWeb, 5 Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again. Much of this wasn't new to me but one statement in particular One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSSfeeds become available. Made me think a little. The RSS feeds of tagged urls I have employed before and we have been using tags to identify interesting urls to work colleages for sometime. Why just restrict yourself to tagged urls though, anything that you can tag online could result in useful RSS feeds (although it is usually going to resolve to a useful url). In fact it is sometimes easy to forget that feeds from de.licio.us tags represent tagged urls (the comments are useful here to add further information), a feed directly from a set of tagged resources could in theory provide richer information.

Another element was the recent and very fruitful experiments I have been having with tagging and RSS feeds to help me with the process of learning Chinese vocabulary. I tag online dictionary entries on Chinese words as urls in del.icio.us, keeping the dictionary definition in the title and comment (along with other notes in the comment) and consuming the feeds in various places allows me to sort, search through, view and categorise the words I am learning in many different ways. Becasue these are not new items some ways of consuming RSS don't allow you easily remove items that have moved from one category to another, but using a combination of GoogleReader, RSSOwl, live bookmarks, Netvibes etc. I have all the ways to view, sort, search, archive my word lists that I could ever wish for.

Back to the orignal question, having access to RSS feeds of your tags in an online application allows you sort search and view your data in ways that suit you but that may not be supported in the original application. If you use two or more applications for similar purposes then RSS feeds can allow you to "silo bust" and combine similar information that you are interested in from many different sources.

Ouch unfortunately thinking about this has led to an uncomfortable conclusion, although del.icio.us is tagging links, these links represent resources.
If you are writing an application and providing tagging for your users then perhaps you should ask "how do these tags add value over them just tagging the resources in a service like del.icio.us?"

Perhaps one option is to co-opt your tagging systems to add other functionality to your site. By using a series of reserved "system tags" you can added a fileing cabinet of items for later reading or items for sharing etc. etc. In the same way that much new functionality is built on top of del.icio.us, (the readeroo plugin for example). If you already have data that maps tags to users why not use this to define other behaviours?

When RSS feeds disappear (Chinesepod)

I am now completely reliant on RSS feeds to keep up with changing content from all over the Internet, they allow me to monitor changes and new posts on far more sites than would be possible if I just used my browser and web addresses. Also I can often read content without visiting the sites themselves. I prefer to monitor feeds online
using a combination of Netvibes and Google Reader.

Where the system really breaks down is when the RSS feeds vanish and a small part of your information update system fails to update. Unfortunately Chinesepod have done this to me twice now. RSS feeds either disappearing or being re-assigned to new urls, they even managed to destroy most of the feeds on their Netvibes universe so I just deleted the tab (a bit unfortunate after they went to the trouble to set it up).

For example, I like to read Ken Carroll's blog but the feed has shifted on me at least a couple of times now (if you include the move from Chinesepod to Praxis), at least now he has his own domain (ken-carroll.com) I should be safe :).

I guess I am saying that you should aim to keep your RSS as permanent as humanly possible, even if you change the url structure of your site then url-rewrites or re-directs should be employed to safegaurd your subscriber base.

It seems we all need to remember that your website is not your product data and content that you produce may be being used and consumed by people that never or hardly every visit your website. I was delighted to discover recently that one of the many online presences where I work is now almost exclusively accessed via RSS requests rather than the website itself.

Generally of course I feel that Chinesepod do a very good and innovative job, and the fact that I bother to re-find Ken's output is an indicator that along with people like Stephen Downes (who Ken also mentions) I am often interested in what he has to say, many other sources of information would just be lost.

I want full RSS (but is that good for everybody?)

Interesting to come across a controversial issue by experience rather than than reading about it. Wanting to keep up with increasing amounts of information from forums and blogs etc. I have been utilising RSS feed in Netvibes and Google Reader to more and more effect. I have heard it said that you can process around 10 times as much information this way. Not sure how that is worked out but for sure I can get through a lot more than visiting individual websites.

I hadn't really thought about this issue before because most (if not all) of the feeds I was most interested in were full feeds, I can read the full content in my online RSS readers. This reduces distraction and allows me to absorb more in less time.

It was only when I came to pull in a number of feeds from an online magazine into a Netvibes tab that I came unstuck. The feeds were partial so I had to follow each link to read the full content. The experience was not nowhere near as pleasant or convenient.

I had a look around the Internet and found a number of posts and viewpoints. Aside from any bandwidth issues, what might be good for me may not be so good for advertisers, may not be so good for tracing site usage (although feedburner can help here).

I still need to think about this some more. As a consumer I prefer full feeds by far but should I feel the same when thinking on the behalf of my Employer? (it seems I am finding this duality is common nowadays).