Prince Harry and the RSS feeds
The briefest of posts to keep things updated (it’s all about metadata, apparently) and to note that RSS feeds are officially crap. The News of the World doesn’t even have one, as far as I can see. Although it is today featuring the video of Prince Harry indulging the sort of forces-speak you’d encounter any day in the army.
As for the other newspapers’ RSS feeds, to read them is to roam around a sort of sub-world of the newspaper itself, getting glimpses of what’s in the actual paper or on the paper’s website. I do quite regularly surf through the main papers’ RSS feeds and get an impression of what they’ve published. But for the fuller picture, you have to visit the paper’s website and to get any idea of how a paper is prioritising one story or feature over another there is still no real substitute than to buy and read the paper version.
New media bods take note. RSS feeds need to become much more sophisticated, more exhaustive and more user-friendly before they will be widely used.
January 12th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Lucecannon - you have evoked another non-telly thought:
When I was younger, the word feed was applied to babies, lifestock, and wildlife. Now it descibes lots of indigestible things. Makes me think of that great North American Indian Proverb from about 1860:
‘When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money’. [Change 'money' for 'information' - it works just as well].
Surely the world has gone mad.
Mondays eh.
By the way, did anyone see the darts last night - awesome.