Redesign: RSS Feeds

The development team here continues to plow ahead with the site redesign, and we’re reaching the point in time when we have to start thinking about how much we will open up to our readers.

I’m a huge fan of turning over as much control as possible to the digerati because, in many cases, the masses are far better at fine-tuning products than designers and developers. If you’re reading this now, you can largely thank the faceless masses for making that possible. (Thank you!)

That said, media companies are still trying to figure out how to traverse this brave new world of Wikis and blogging without completely diluting the name brand that brings people to their site. Ideally, I’d love to start a Technology Review Wiki, where we had an encyclopedia of emerging technologies and existing technologies that were completely built and maintained by users. (In fact, if you’d like to help us get started on that – please feel free to email me.)

For now, though, I want to focus on our coming RSS feeds. We have what I think is a very cool solution. We are working on a tool that will both allow users complete and independent interactivity, and preserve the name that many have come to trust. The tool allows readers to see the RSS feeds that some editors have set up (i.e., Brad King’s RSS feeds) and add their own feeds (eventually, we’d like to open it up so that people can then snag other feeds from users, thus creating a social network of RSS feeds).

That’s just a quick look at the tool. It’s still in development, and as we move closer to finalizing it, I’ll talk more specifically about our partner and how this will all fit into our mission. For now, I’m interested in finding out which RSS Readers you use – and what features you think are the most important for a good Reader.