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The "Feedization" Of The Text User Interface
Most blogs are multi-column (two or three) web pages with a single column of posts organized in chronological order.
Most feeds are delivered the same way minus the extra columns.
This is a technique taken (at least from my vantage point) from the news feeds and other information feeds of the financial markets.
We used to call it a bulletin board system.
Not we call it a blog or a feed.
Most people who have grown up designing magazines or newspapers probably look at this user interface and think of it as ugly and boring.
But I think its super efficient (like the single search field on google.com).
And I think we'll see two trends, at least in online publishing.
- more and more text oriented content will be organized in this manner
- feeds and blogs will look more and more alike. there will come a time when you are reading a feed in a reader and you will think you are reading the blog in a browser.
I am not sure whether the feeds wil move more toward the blog style or the blogs will move more toward the feed style, but I feel pretty strongly that we'll see the two start to merge in the coming year or two.
I have always felt that function wins out over form in mediums where such things can be measured.
March 26, 2006 Venture Capital and Technology | Comments (8) | TrackBack (1)
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Fred Wilson over at A VC wrote some thoughts about how online content publishing is converging into a unified display based on single-column layouts because it is simply more efficient (he compares it to the simple search field at Google). He goes on t... [Read More]
Tracked on Mar 26, 2006 11:40:28 PM
Comments
Will there be some way we could comment from the feed reader itself? How do you see that coming? That, in my opinion, is probably, one of the major differentiating factors between the feed and the blog.
Posted by: Danesh | Mar 26, 2006 11:28:47 AM
I believe newspaper websites pioneered the "three column" design that you're referring to. This layout has a lot to do with displaying as many items "above the fold" and between the 800 pixels (really 770) that most people see on a 'normal' screen.
Screen sizes are changing a lot, recently - so the old 'three' column is going to change as well (see ESPN).
I like your point about feed displays changing. I think RSS will have to change to make people's feeds look "blogish".
But people are going to want to display more than just posts and ads - there's more info that they'll want to syndicate.
I'd also like to see comments within the feeds - why has this taken so long? (Please Feedburner).
Posted by: Rick | Mar 26, 2006 4:24:48 PM
One thing I've been toying with is the idea of actually producing the "web pages" as RSS -- i mean, with modern browsers that support xml and css xsl etc so well, why even bother with seperate formats?
Im so taken with this idea i may even try it on my personal blog im busy messing with at the moment.
Posted by: Nick Wilson | Mar 26, 2006 4:32:06 PM
I agree with the ancestry, and the efficiency, of the modern blog/feed format. But I disagree that one should ever be confused whether they are reading a feed (by which I read "through a graphical aggregator tool") or a blog ("the web-based source of the content"). I hope you will post more on why you expect visual convergence, because when I start from the same position (newsfeed) I expect more extreme divergence.
Why should the other columns be included in the feed? I see feed readers becoming more sophisticated (comment support, etc). They are selected by users for the experience. A well-designed user interface for reading blogs should strip each blog of its unique but static characteristics, as it is more efficient for reading and commenting without having to process different visual clues.
The blog, on the other hand, is an advertisement and a permalink. When I started to read your blog, I went to the site: your interface, your blog roll, and your mantra were important. When I see a post I wish to pass on to another party, I refer back to the site.
I return to newswire history for an analogy. On the radio, we opened our show with brief stories from the AP newswire. The stories were in a large monospaced font in speech-friendly copy. It made it possible to recite without reading, but ill-suited for comprehension and analysis. The AP newswire also provided a news gathering interface that cluttered the screen and printed page with relevant additional information, callout figures, definitions: things we could use in discussion but slowed down the eye to speech path.
As a frequent reader of your blog/feed, every post does not require access to your mantra, your blogroll, or your feed links: they don't change frequently, and impare access to the change I am interested in. I am familiar with your context and content, I just want to see what you've written now. But as a linker to your blog, those context-building acoutrement matter. They mean that I need not provide an introduction, context, or deny my traffic the opportunity to become a frequent reader themselves.
Posted by: Dan Vogel | Mar 26, 2006 5:42:08 PM
Consistent with the evolution of information formatting, from bulletin boards, to websites, to blogs, I would take what you are saying one step further and suggest that we are going to see the emergence of entirely new types of formatting.
Although I agree with you on the utility of the current column structure, I think that the rise of content mash-ups (see, http://galaxy.blogs.com/venture_capital_thoughts_/2006/03/editors_wanted_.html), will lead to new innovations in formatting, meaning that less text oriented content will be organized in the manner that you describe.
That said, newspaper and magazine formatting has not changed that much in the last hundred years so perhaps you are right.
Either way it will be exciting to see the new formats that arise!
Posted by: Simon | Mar 26, 2006 9:53:49 PM
Well, I agree with Dan as I'm not sure that visual convergence will make the hole thing more efficient. When I read one of your post through my bloglines reader, I don't need your extra colums. When I do so, I just click to you blog address.
It'll be great if you can point out why you think this visual convergence will happen, because for now, I can't see any good reasons why it should be.
Posted by: martin | Mar 26, 2006 10:12:00 PM
Nobody has mentioned mobile in this discussion. I believe mobile will be a big driver in this convergance. With EV-DO blowing up and new devices like Origami coming out, more people will be reading feeds / blogs at the gym, on the train and at the lunch counter. Three columns simply does not work on a 480px wide display (umpc in portrait mode). People who want their stuff read by busy folks will make their layouts liquid.
Posted by: James Prudente | Mar 28, 2006 12:19:37 AM
I don't agree that RSS/Blogs have made user interface almost pointless. I think that the opposite is true. With the dramatic move of breaking the content away from it's container (as RSS does) the 'viewer' becomes even more relevant.
Right now the metaphor is 'Email Reading'. Feed readers allow you to 'mark items as read' and 'flag for follow-up'. They have gravitated to that format because it's what we know and the inertia has kept it in that direction for a while.
Over time, however, I think there has to be new metaphors - metaphors that make sense for the type and application of content.
This makes the viewer (and its interface) even more important. A 'river of content' can only take us so far.
Posted by: Chris Saad | Apr 2, 2006 9:23:54 AM
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