Day: September 7, 2005

If you’re into web development, check Anil Dash’s predictions for Web Development in 2006. I’m not playing with the sharp end of the programming stick, so I don’t have the skills required to jump in here. The list is compelling (even if I’d quibble about some of it, in my uninformed way) since I agree completely with the importance of UI.

Some of the overall areas of focus are integration (as always) and front-end technologies that have highly visible impacts on end user experience.

To me, Web 2.0 means technologies serving the experience, rather than vice versa. If that becomes the norm, everyone benefits.

I haven’t turned to the LazyWeb often because I don’t have many readers, but maybe there’s just enough with the right bent.

The question:

What’s the best example on the web today of listing several hundred (or thousand) RSS feeds in a useful way, so readers can find the feed(s) they might be interested in without having a needle-in-haystack feeling?

Send suggestions, preferably with example URLs, to my work email address: john.roberts AT cnetDOTcom.

Why? The current News.com RSS listing page isn’t complete any more, and the current design hardly scales to even the few dozen feeds listed. I think it deserves a fresh start.

One answer to the question is “don’t try; use auto-discovery contextually everywhere,” and that’s not a terrible answer. I’ll aim to do that, too, as more feeds become public material. But I believe a single page (or group of pages, perhaps) can be a meaningful, useful method all the same, and it would be a handy place for offering OPML file(s) of groups of feeds, if nothing else.

Thanks for the help, syndication mavens everywhere.

What does it mean that syndication stuff is what I turn to when I can’t sleep and I don’t want to do my more urgent (though not important) tasks?