With the massive adoption of microblogging platforms like Twitter, there’s been talk about whether or not RSS readers are dead (1, 2, 3) . One of the recent threads in this discussion happened over at Mashable in which one of the commenters (Eric McGinnis) mentioned feedmil — something that isn’t an RSS reader or a microblogging platform. Essentially, with feedmil, you can search blogs, microblogs, and news sites. But that simplicity belies its power (at least as far as I’m concerned). It’s got numerous features, but here’s just a little smattering of what I found beneath the surface.
- Interface:
It sports an interface that foregrounds simplicity and clear visual cueing. Both of these make it very intuitive. - Sorting:
You can sort feeds by blogs, microblogs, podcasts, and others. You can also sort by feedmil rank, relevance, or quality. It also has multi-lingual capabilities. - The Slider: customizing search results —
One of its more distinctive options is a set of sliders that allow you to customize related keywords (what they call Topic Significance). For, for example, if I enter the terminstructional technology
, one of the related keywords that will appear in the Topic Significance slider column isuniversity
. If I then move the slider to the right to increase its significance, then my search results are automatically tailored towards higher education. (UI gift = No need to click a confirmation [OK] button.) - The Slider: skipping through history —
When you click on a specific search hit or result, not only does it display a brief synopsis and relevant urls, but it gives you another slider tool to quickly explore the chronology of a blog without even going to the site itself. So, for example, when you move the slider to the left, it moves back through the previous entries and displays the entries for those dates. Pretty slick for doing quick historical searches.
So in my initial fooling around with it, the Slider seems to be where its real potential power lies; it pushes beyond basic keyword searches.
Am I going to toss my RSS reader? Not likely. For me, my reader (currently NetNewsWire) is still an optimum way to keep up with my favorite observers and analysts. But I definitely plan to use this as a research tool and would suggest it to students.