Browsing and Blogging from within an Aggregator Vs. Aggregating and Blogging from within a Browser. Which one do you prefer?
Posted : July 7, 2004 at 8:27 pm [America/Los_Angeles]
All you have to do is look at the current crop of successful XML feed aggregators and you can’t miss a common thread - they all do (or atleast attempt to do) a very, very good job of seamlessly integrating the functionalities of a browser, a feeds aggregator and a blogging client. Not that there is anything wrong with it. However, in my humble opinion, it really ought to be centered around a browser.
Here’s how I see it:
- Browser == Primarily Content & eServices consumption engine. In other words, while using a browser, an end-user can consume (surf) as well as create (ecommerce transactions) content
- XML feeds Aggregator == Primarily Content consumption engine. Kinda like an LDAP client performing majority of reads and very few writes.
- Blogging client == Primarily Content creation engine
With that said, which consumption tool would be (or ought to be) our default choice? Thanks to ecommerce and other buzz words starting with e, not to mention years of dominating the internet space (next only to an email client), I would venture that a browser would definitely be the first choice of content consumption. If so, should we not try to integrate XML feeds aggregator into a browser?
What about a blog client? Why should content creation and consumption be merged? There are two reasons why I think a browser (or a well-written browser extension) should also act as a blogging client:
- I am willing to bet that greater than 90% of the content created in the blogging world today has its roots in another piece of content (or information) also found via a browser or an XML feeds aggregator. If so, it would make all the more sense to integrate the content consumption and creation tool into one
- When Netscape came out with it’s Communicator suite, how many of you truly used its Netscape Composer feature to ‘create’ and ‘publish’ content. Again, I am willing to bet there were very few who did that. A good part of it had to do with the fact that Netscape Composer was not just a content creation and publishing tool, but a content presentation generation tool as well. Thanks to the blog engines and their extensive use of CSS stylesheets, the presentation layer is pre-defined thereby making blogging, for the most part, a content creation exercise. If there would be a Netscape Communicator around today, I would be willing to bet that they would have chucked their Netscape Composer in favor of a Blog client.
So, what has all this got to do with Safari RSS?
If what I read about it and saw in this Quicktime movie is right, in my hunble opinion, Apple has once again got it right. It appears to me that they have embedded their XML feeds aggregation functionality into their browser software (and not the other way around). Sure wish the Mozilla team (the true geniuses behind Firefox and Thunderbird) would consider doing something similar?
Here’s a thought:
Firefox with capabilities of NewzCrawler and w.Bloggar all nicely rolled into one power pack!
Sounds like a winning combination to me 
Or, does it even matter?
- Anand
Category: Services and Software