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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Podcast apps are all built on the technology. RSS readers like Feedly still work, and there are lots of new blogs that use RSS.

But, the article seems to be describing something else.

Today k-Collector would not be possible. That alternative future where everyone started blogging and putting their content in RSS2.0 feeds that we could analyse to connect those conversations did not happen.

I honestly didn't understand the article. I gathered that he created some kind of tool that aggregated blog posts based on their tags and created an RSS feed out of that, maybe like delic.io.us did? But isn't that already being done by the RSS readers? So, I still think I don't understand the article.

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If the underlying RSS technology still works just fine and has momentum, then saying it is dying is going to kill that momentum. This sounds like a marketing problem more than anything else.

Which is to say: It is a problem to be solved with communication and coordination tools kinda like this (but much lower urgency)

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-tea...

Good point. There isn't even a good website for RSS. RSS.com is a podcasting service. RSS.org is the website of some guy who has these initials. The most official source is the wikipedia page, which obviously is a just neutral explanation, not trying to advertise it. There's a site called You Need Feeds[1], which is trying to advertise it, but it doesn't look official and doesn't show up on the first page when you google RSS (which according to keyword planner 10K to 100K people do in the US alone).

[1]: https://www.youneedfeeds.com/

I feel like it needs a group identity around it —- how about “Syndicalists”?

I think this is about pingbacks and trackbacks, basically that you could (theoretically) treat blogs as a distributed forum with RSS and a few other technologies providing the topical or temporal links between them.

Looks like TFA’s tool was a way to surface these.

I think the difference between k-Collector and an RSS reader was that there was a public feed for every topic.

k-Collector was aggregating many feeds and building a browsable content database indexed by a community created taxonomy based on facets such as who, what, where, and when. Yes, each tag had its own RSS feed (I believe we also supported feeds for combinations of tags, it was definitely on the roadmap) but we were also connecting together related tags, forming tag groups, supporting filters. We were also starting to think about how to address the problems in shared taxonomy. It was a very fertile period.

Was it / it sounds similar to delic.io.us, in that users tagged web pages, including blog posts and each of those tags had their own feeds? It was glorious. If you wanted to know what was happening with some topic in the world, subscribing to its delicious tag was the way to find out.

del.icio.us was a social bookmarking site, i was a user back then for a while. While there were similarities, it didn't aggregate content per se. and was solving a rather different problem.

That's where I am confused.

As described, k-Collector seems to be solving a subset of the problem space that delic.io.us did. kConnect presents feeds of different blogs grouped by tag, while delic.io.us did the same, but for all websites, not just blog posts. What am I missing?

It sounds like a really interesting experiment, is why I'm so interested. Are you sure it can't be revived?

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