A Terrifying Cascade of Ben
May 1st, 2008I have a friend called Ben. He’s mostly my Internet friend, though I’ve met him a few times. His online presence is almost terrifyingly vast. It extends to many forums, email, three separate blogs, a Twitter feed, a comic, some Ficlets, some art, Facebook, a couple of gaming sites, and a bunch of other stuff. That’s a lot, but luckily, it’s all RSS’d up to the hilt, so I just subscribed to pretty well the whole lot in Google Reader and forgot about it.
This does mean I get a few things twice, though. For example, his Ficlets traditionally appear on his blog on a Friday afternoon, so I get those twice. Of course, his blog posts are syndicated to his tweets, so I get them again when that RSS comes through. Of course, his tweets are syndicated to his Facebook status, so I get it all again after that. I think all in all I get about four different alerts whenever Ben posts a Ficlet, spread over about a fortnight.
I’m not really complaining, because of course I could just disable a few of the feeds. I just worry that he might install something to syndicate his Facebook status to his blog and break the internet…
RSS is a wonderful tool, but it can only be a matter of time before it breaks something important.
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May 1st, 2008 at 21:52
I don’t know whether this is a commentary about me or the obvious flaws with RSS.
May 2nd, 2008 at 00:15
Don’t worry; nor do I.
May 2nd, 2008 at 23:58
There’s another side to this, which is when something interesting gets written on a blog I subscribe to, and, say, badscienceblogs.net aggregates it and serves it up again, as does, say, BPSDB, and then it’ll get on a couple of del.icio.us feeds, and maybe ReadBurner…
Google Reader does try to fix it a bit; it collapses these duplicates into one entry, but it’s not very good at that.