News sites & RSS
As an avid RSS consumer, I have come to feel many of the frustrations and problems the internet faces with its best content delivery system. RSS can be a truly game changing thing if you adopt it. I have a single site I visit which pulls in content from over 100 others and lets me quickly skim through and read. The problem is, included in the many sites I pull in, in an effort to stay informed and well rounded in the news, I pull in feeds from:
- Al Jazeera
- Washington Post
- NPR
- The Hill
- Seattle Times
- Kent Reporter (my local town's online news site / blog)
And, while they accomplish my goal of providing me robust headline coverage, they also greatly clog my RSS feed with hundreds of posts a day. It's not the quantity which bothers me, but that there are a few repeated issues I have across these sites:
- SEO driven news posts - This morning I dug in, thinking I had an issue with my RSS reader not properly handling updated posts as I saw the same infographic and post about the Pope on my Al Jazeera feed. As I researched, what I realized is that I was seeing Al Jazeera's TWO posts which both relied on the majority same content and infographic. One was about the story, and one was an "explainer." There is no good way to smartly filter these out, so I will simply have to endure the noise.
- Straight spam - The Kent Reporter is a small blog, probably part of a bigger network behind the scenes, but they used to put straight up spam news for cars, products, medicines, etc. through their RSS feed though these didn't appear on the homepage. I get it. It's not a well earning gig and if someone supplements it with these posts, I don't have to like it, but I can't blame them. However, I was very annoyed they came out through the RSS feed.
- Lack of feeds - Honestly, the above news sources aren't all my primary sites. I'd love to fold some more news magazines and stuff into my reader, but they've dropped RSS support. And that frustrates me. Hopefully we'll see them return. Maybe.