This is especially timely, as I'm currently building a service that let's you receive your RSS feed as a physical newspaper.
Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
I suspect maybe it's easier now to nail the layout if ai can read content before it goes to print.
AI is indeed a crucial part in solving the two most difficult challenges -- typesetting and curation, although we'll probably do things that don't scale for a little while before fully automating.
My feeds are pretty unpredictable - sometimes I have 40 new articles in a day, sometimes just a few. The cheapness of digital consumption and interface makes it viable for me to skim titles and read, defer, or dismiss at my judgement. I don't want the entire feed printed out - not viable.
But if some SaaS is curating my feeds for me, I fear it'll turn into another algorithmized something optimizing for what exactly? At least the first-pass filter is explicitly set by me - feeds I subscribe to.
Curious to hear your thoughts on it, and wishing you luck.
I am sure people use RSS in many different ways though, it just doesn't seem useful to me.
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
Recently I’ve been living in a cottage town and thought of this idea again… rather than be reading on phones or tablets people could read printed books with their favourite articles or blogs. But I think the actual distribution system would be the killer, unless it’s at a big resort the transportation will kill the idea.