If blogs really are about conversations, then why not make them more like human conversations and add a face or two to the feeds?
All the aggregators I’ve tried to date are text based. They have (broadly) 3 panes – an “all your feeds” list, a “selected feed’s titles” lists, and a “selected title’s post or excerpt”. My “all my feeds” list is growing inexorably bigger and at some stage, it’s going to be long and unmanageable. In my experience, some people are better at remembering names and some people are better at remembering faces. (Personally I’m better at faces – names I’m normally fine on, but there will be hideous blanks now and then.) But aren’t the aggregators slightly skewed towards people who are better at names?
It’s just a thought, but I’d be really curious to see what sort of a difference adding some sort of small visual cue (e.g. passport photo, Technorati profile photo, group logo) to that list would make. So, instead of having a load of “Bill’s Blog about Everything” feeds whose value to me becomes harder to distinguish as time goes by, I might get a little picture of Bill and then the title of the feed/blog. Perhaps it might help sort through unwieldy subscription lists?
(And er, I realise I don’t have a picture of me on this blog, but [sigh] I will soon – just let me comb what hair I have left, lance this unsightly boil, and get my dentures back from next door’s Alsatian….)
Hi Piers,
it is what I do in my blogroll, as does Sebastian Fiedler with all his posts: seblogging.cognitivearchitects.com.
Not quite in the feeds yet, but I’ve a feeling it will get there.
best,
Ton
Hi Ton,
It was partly with you two in mind that I thought about having it in feeds 🙂 – I think it works with both of your sites. I’ve a feeling it’ll get there too – and it’ll be interesting to see how it helps people sort through their burgeoning numbers of feed subscriptions.
Cheers, Piers.
… Is this bridging with modalities about forming shared experiences? …
Hey, Shirley has faces with her blog posts — but still not in the feeds I’ve seen! http://shirley.blogdrive.com/
I’m not sure if it’s exactly what you are getting out, but the Bloglines aggregator shows a graphic (the HTML page icon?) against the text entitling each feed. So this helps somewhat for those of us who are not be entirely text-modal. Or were you referring to some visual cues as to the identity on a particular conversationalist, as in most BBS (=avatars) these days?
Consistency is one of the big requirements. Some people, for example you, effectively rename other peoples blogs in their blogrolls. I think this is naughty because it places an additional cognitive and memory load on the spectator. “is that the blog of such and such or isn’t it??” E.g. you and I know that she is Lilia Efimova but her brand/text-icon — which appears in my aggregator listing — is Mathemagenic.
I also have my picture as a fav.ico which loads as in my rss-reader as a logo next to the feed.
Monkeymagic: Feeds & Faces
Monkeymagic has a simple yet compelling suggestion for improving RSS feeds: Add a photo of the author. Why not put a picture pane in the RSS reader so that you can see who is talking? Beyond creating a sense of intimacy that may, over time, help foster…