RSS is a wonderful invention. But what it often means is that you try to read ten times the content that you used to. Because, of course, it’s so easy to slip through feeds in your RSS reader, and so whenever you find a new website with an interesting article you hit the orange button. (By the way, if you haven’t already, do hit the orange button).

And Google Reader is a great product. It really is. But then you wake up one morning, hit the link and there are 11,000 unread items. Plus Google has been a bit naughty recently with its interface design. What once looked cool and clean is now a bit of a mess.

I present, m’lord, item one:

What is all that stuff? I quite liked it when sharing came along, but now – ugh too much.

Solution 1: It’s Not a List; It’s a Magazine

So I was delighted to discover Feedly last year (via. Drew Benvie). It distils your web feeds, does some magic sorting and displays the stuff you should read on a single page.

I like this a lot. It doesn’t tell you that you’ve got 11,000 unread items; it doesn’t have a ton of possibly important but inscrutable menu links. Like Reader, the content is lazy-loaded in the background, so you can click on links and read the item’s content without reloading the site.

It also doesn’t show you everything. You won’t ‘get-through’ all your feeds this way. But that’s kind of the point. Once you’ve stopped enjoying reading updates, you can move away without feeling guilty.

In case you do feel guilty about this approach to reading RSS feeds, I’d suggest that it’s close to the original ‘river of news’ idea that Dave Winer suggested, except there’s been some clever manipulation of the items so you’re less likely to miss popular news.

Solution 2: Health and Efficiency and Helvetica

So what if you are a bit more conscientious or hard-working? Find that whole magazine idea a bit strange. Or have a keen sense of design offended by so-called web friendly fonts? The solution for you, my benighted friend, is Helvetireader.

Helvetireader is a CSS rework of Google reader that hides extraneous elements and makes the rest look plainer and more beautiful. It’s a two-step installation process. You need to install Greasemonkey for Firefox or Chrome. It’s a scripting add-on that you’ll find lots of other uses for if you look into it.

Then go over to the Helvetireader website, where you can install it from the button. Version 2 has just been released, which is prettier than Version 1, which was awesome. The next time you visit Google Reader, it will be beautified. And minified – the plugin hides a lot of stuff, so you won’t like it if you are addicted to features.

Helvetireader can be used in exactly the same way as normal Google Reader, but works as its best if you know the short-cut keys. There are loads of these. The important ones are:

• j/k – next / previous item
• space – scroll down / next folder
• s – star this item
• shift+s – share this item

It seems as though ‘n’ and ‘p’ do something similar to ‘j’ and ‘k’, but I couldn’t work out the difference.

I’ve produced an experimental social media news page using Feedly Mixes. You can embed this sort of thing into any site you like.

As you can see, it grabs and mixes up the content from selected RSS feeds – a list of sites covering the subject, as chosen by me. It then ranks the articles according to whether I deem a particular site important. Articles that I tweet or share in Feedly will also be included and take precedence on the page. Then it uses Google Reader’s statistics on how many people read, saved and shared articles to bubble up leading stories. Finally, it uses the age of the article as a fourth filter. The content is refreshed every 3–4 hours.

I’m not sure that my particular implementation is especially useful. The sort of person likely to visit this site almost certainly already reads the sites I have selected.

However, I think it could be a really useful tool in other circumstances. If you work in a particular domain – let’s say it’s construction – then it really is child’s play to create a page that gives a digest of the day’s news from the publications that deal with that area. That page could be set as everyone’s home page in your firm, or a link on the browser’s favourites bar, making sure the whole business is up-to-date with the latest news.

It’s better than the sort of pages you get at Alltop because you decide and curate the content sources – the construction page on that site is a good example of why you want this – a lot of the sources are US-based, which won’t be very relevant if, like me, you’re based in South London. There’s also no way I can see to flag particular stories as important.

A slightly more poetic use for Feedly Mixes might be the Interesting Pictures feed from flickr or ffffound. Maybe a personalised web comics page or a selection of new short stories.

NB: WordPress doesn’t deal well with the iFrames used to display the Feedly Widget on pages – you’ll need to install the Embed iFrame plug-in to get it to work.

I’ve been thinking about the future of newspapers a fair bit over the last few weeks, because we’ve been preparing a panel event on just that topic. It’s involved a range of reading and on-record and off-record conversations with a load of people involved with newspapers — readers, editors, pundits and the man on the Clapham Omnibus.

Newspapers, particularly quality papers, look screwed at first view. Only the Sun and the free-sheets did remotely well in the latest ABCs.

[ABC — the Audit Bureau of Circulation creates readership ‘charts’ for newspapers and magazines. Its sister operation ABCe’s work in the online world, but their cost means they’re only used by a minority of online publications, such as newspapers. While they provide a reliable measure of an individual site’s readership, the lack of competitor data might be perceived as a weakness. National newspapers all subscribe to the ABCe scheme, though.]

While online figures continue to soar for the quality papers, those figures are not, sadly, indicative of revenues. Internet advertising costs less than print advertising, by a long way. In other terms, a drop of 5000 on the printed publication might require a hike upwards of 500,000 readers online to make up the same amount of contribution.

And those online readers aren’t especially useful, sometimes. If you have a UK advertising campaign, then the 75% of your readers who come from outside the UK, in the case of many Nationals’ websites, are not contributing. Their ‘hits’ on those websites aren’t helping to fulfil any advertising deals — they’re simply a ‘hit’ on the paper’s resources. Most advertising agencies don’t have any international briefs, just for UK people, so when they buy a million impressions, they don’t mean any old million, they mean a million UK users.

I talk to digital professionals, and all they use is Google and RSS — they haven’t bought newspapers in years, except when they take a flight or a train ride with no wireless. They’re also the most likely people to bring up points about newspapers’ effect on the environment (short version: v.bad; but maybe not as bad as you think).

All doom and gloom, so far. But then I talk to my step-mother, and she’s not having it. She doesn’t want to read a frickin’ screen. I talk to my sister and she says the same thing. I ask my mum, and it turns out she still gets a daily delivery. Once you look outside this digital world of RSS and Google, the demand for mainstream, normal stuff is actually pretty high. I’m pretty fond of papers myself, and if I, as a digital media person and every member of my family I asked, want newspapers (as newspapers), then surely that means a future.

I like to think about the many predictions that have been made over the years about the death of cinema. Televisions, VHS videos, DVDs, wide-screen televisions and now Blu-Ray have all allegedly spelled the end of the cinema age. Yet, surprise, box-office takings were at an all-time high in 2007.

Media don’t die upon the arrival of a new alternative: they adapt and survive. The arrival of urban freesheets in the past few years is evidence of that in the newspaper space. They may not be the model that we’d necessarily hope for as journalists or news consumers, but they’re certainly evidence of innovation and adaptation. Let’s hope that examples more conducive to quality reporting also bear fruit. The appearance of ShortList this year, offering decent-quality content at a freesheet price may be one indication.

What I hope comes out of our debate on the 28th October is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the future of newspapers, but some ideas about the type and extent of change and adaptation that is likely to be needed to ensure the future existence of quality journalism and, dare I say it, quality newspapers.

Do join us.

Kate sums up the arguments:

(a) readers hate it

(b) full feeds actually increase traffic

The second point is, as she says, counter-intuitive, but basically it means that you can hang on to readers who aren’t committed enough to come to your site every day, draw in more occasional readers, and please your regular readers by giving them the choice.

Update: Even cooler – it will even work through an RSS feed, launching a new window from the button that is presented.

Just a thought. Does any aggregator generate a live OPML file that I could use to feed Grazr?

Thanks to the ‘beers’ aspect, my notes get a little sketchy after the first speaker. Richard said that the way to approach the problem of evangelising RSS is to think about the benefits for the user, not the technology. Talk about ‘never missing a feature or an offer’, not ‘feeds’.We need to lose the little orange button and the name RSS because they mean nothing to anyone but geeks. They serve to keep the technology niche.

Peter talked about his DeepTag project as a way to simplify getting the news from the people we care about and doing real social networking in a way that sites like del.icio.us don’t allow. It appears to be a combination of various different Web 2.0 services wrapped with RSS and concentrated around friends and family.

Ivan said that the ways in which people want to use the web are incredibly diverse. The media model of the future is about assembling the stuff you want. He likened his RSS reader to a magazine that rebuilt itself every few minutes. But it could do more to be user-friendly: people shouldn’t have to deal with XML or OPML to make their personalised magazines. He doesn’t think that innovators have anything to fear from MySpace — the AOL of Web 2.0 which will start to die as soon as it starts to lock out.

The ensuing discussion fell largely into three camps: (a) I don’t care about RSS; I just want my stuff when I want it (Thayer Driver, Chinwag, among others); (b) RSS brings accountability to marketeers and editors because their success is directly measurable through the number of Feedburner subscribers you acquire and keep (Sam Sethi, Techcrunch UK); © No it isn’t. Feedburner stats fluctuate wildly, and you can’t tell if anyone reads the stuff you’re pushing out, no matter what your subscription figures say (Ian Forrester, BBC Backstage). Then everyone got drunk and we all ended up hugging.

What do I think? I use RSS every day for reading blogs and I love it, but it doesn’t provide a complete newsreading solution. Mainstream newspapers and most magazines in the UK don’t currently offer full text feeds, just headlines and a taster. It’s not easy to deliver display advertising in the format, which is how they make their money. And any site with a paywall or registration (WSJ, ft.com, for example) aren’t going to offer a full text feed any time soon. Evangelists think these problems will just go away: that market forces will ensure that only those publications that allow full feeds will survive. This may happen in the long term, but that ‘long term’ may take a long time to come.

I completely agree that ordinary people don’t know about RSS, don’t care and that they shouldn’t have to. If it’s going anywhere, it needs to be utterly de-geekified.

At this point, the service still needs a little work. It functions, but not quite as smoothly as I’d like. The pace of development has been pretty hectic so far, though, so it should be straightened out soon. Also, I think they have a USP and offer a clever and original service, which I much prefer to hear about than another me-too video sharing/social network/news voting site.

I don’t really do product news. It’s an area that’s very well-served already. So I took the opportunity to ask rude questions about the background to the service.

(1) What is your business model?
Audabble is free to use but is supported by some advertising. However, the actual business model is based up premium services which will be added to the service in the next few weeks. These include the ability to customise the news feed aspect by choosing your own feeds, time intervals for specific feeds (you may want to hear BBC news hourly, but Digg stories half-hourly), and the ability to download those stories as mp3 for use on other devices/players.

(2) In what respects is this a Web 2.0 application?
Well, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s a fair bit of discussion about this, and I was almost hesitant in using the term when I contacted you. But in the respect of a small producer being able to create a service relatively quickly and cheaply is the key for me, and that’s what makes audabble “web 2.0″. However, I could mention AJAX and RSS to complete the buzzword definition!

(3) How much time and money has it taken to set up Audabble?
Audabble is self-funded and has taken 2–3 weeks to create and set up. Its only costs are hosting which hopefully will increase if the service gains some popularity!