Scoble on “Why RSS is more productive than Web” includes several good ideas. None of them are new to me, but perhaps useful to reinforce some points I’m trying to make. I was struck, however, by this item:
3) No looking for “what’s new.” When you visit a site like CNET you need to do a lot of mental work to see what was different from yesterday when you read the site. In NewsGator new things are bold. I don’t need to do any work and I don’t need to pay any attention to old things.
All websites which used vlink (visited link) colors — which is well over 99.9% of them, since it’s the default and it’s smart — have some ability to help you distinguish what you’ve read before… if you click through. Should a website take it one step further, and mark something ‘read’ even if you just see a headline and (maybe) a brief? Avoiding for a minute the difficulties of knowing just what a person ‘saw’ on a webpage that extends more than one screen, and the problem of consistent identification/recognition of a reader… what’s enough of a change to call something old or new? No answers on a Sunday night, but interesting questions.