Kinja Unpacked:
The fact that I didn’t understand Kinja as an Alpha tester is not surprising because I don’t understand any web geegaw the first time around. Or the fifth. By then my patience is drained and I call upon friends to explain it to me in plain English. I give up easily.
This was the case with Blogger, with Flickr, with rss readers which I thought Kinja was until I saw this post from Jason Kottke and this one from Tom Coates, whom I’ve never met but I’m inviting into my Expert Barn.
I originially saw Kinja as my Great Web Hope, the answer to keeping track of the mess of blogs I like to read but A) forget they exist B) get so sick of clicking and typing URL’s that I give up by the letter “B” C) would like to pick and choose which posts I read but some interest me and some don’t. My friend Dan explained to me that NetNewsWire does all of these things just fine. He’s right. And as soon as every site I like has an RSS feed and I get used to reading them in that abreviated/no graphic form, it’ll be all I need.
I thought Kinja would be a kind of souped up reader, all of these things in a nifty web interface, as neat and compact as the Megnut mojo behind it.
I was wrong. Kinja is too feature-weak to be a tool for the experienced reader. You can’t create seperate lists for weblogs of different subjects, you can’t choose which order you’d like to read your list, you can’t view a master list of suggested sites on certain topics. It’s basically like a tickertape of your blog universe and useful for just about that amount of time.
However, Jason and Tom have imagined Kinja as a kind of web vouyerism, a way to peek in on other blogger’s browsing habits that they might not include in their blogroll. Jason has included a mark next to the links in his blogroll which have Kinja digests. Take this a step further and you’ve got Friendster For Wlogrolls, where reading lists can be swapped and shared as easily as an Itunes playlist.
This I get.
Reader interactions
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So where’s your Kinja playlist? Mine is at http://www.kinja.com/user/photomatt .
So where’s your Kinja playlist? Mine is at http://www.kinja.com/user/photomatt .
There is, in fact, an Arts & Letters Daily RSS feed:
http://interglacial.com/rss/aldaily_content.rss
There is, in fact, an Arts & Letters Daily RSS feed:
http://interglacial.com/rss/aldaily_content.rss
What in hell is it doing on some site called “interglacial?”
What in hell is it doing on some site called “interglacial?”
Am I considered a luddite if I don’t understand a single thing you’re talking about in this post?
Am I considered a luddite if I don’t understand a single thing you’re talking about in this post?
Sean, who runs interglacial, evidently was frustrated that some of his favorite sites were not offering RSS feeds. So he built some of his own, automatically generated from the sites in question. Here’s his full list:
http://interglacial.com/rss/
Sean, who runs interglacial, evidently was frustrated that some of his favorite sites were not offering RSS feeds. So he built some of his own, automatically generated from the sites in question. Here’s his full list:
http://interglacial.com/rss/
Translation: when it comes to devices on how to keep track of the blogs you like to read, Kevin is a moron. Kinja, he thought, would solve this problem. It didn’t. it instead allowed Kevin to see what blogs other bloggers he knew were reading, like peeking over their shoulders. That has its own value, albeit a different one and not solving Kevin’s idiocy around this subject.
Translation: when it comes to devices on how to keep track of the blogs you like to read, Kevin is a moron. Kinja, he thought, would solve this problem. It didn’t. it instead allowed Kevin to see what blogs other bloggers he knew were reading, like peeking over their shoulders. That has its own value, albeit a different one and not solving Kevin’s idiocy around this subject.