Jackson Miller

Have you seen ReadBurner.com? It is a service that allows you to post a feed of your “shared items” from Google Reader or your “clippings” from Newsgator/FeedDemon/NetNewsWire. ReadBurner then displays what the most popular items are. It is the latest entry in the “cream floats to the top” category of applications like TechMeme or Digg (and a bazillion others).

It is a great idea, but I must admit I find the implementation a little lacking. The site is not exactly easy on the eyes which makes reading tough. I am also not a fan of having yet another place to leave comments (but someone will solve the decentralized comments problem, some are getting close). Another “huh?” is that there is no real way to browse via topical information. Almost every single blog post on the internet has either categories or tags or both. Why in the world ReadBurner is not displaying a really great tag cloud is beyond me (unless of course they experimented with it and found that the tag cloud turns out to not be really great).

Despite what I wish was better about ReadBurner, I still really like it. It is not exactly useful for me yet, but they are headed in a great direction that can be really useful. How I am reading feeds is starting to change. I used to be a huge “3 pane” reader when my feeds were like my email program. I am much more of a “river of news” reader now. The problem is that the river is not sorted correctly yet. NetNewsWire does a pretty good job of sorting the feeds I am subscribed to based on attention, but as I am adding more feeds of shared items and clippings, I want duplicates to float to the top (which is exactly what ReadBurner does, it is just not my feeds).

It is too bad that this post might sound critical. I am really digging the direction that ReadBurner and NewsGator are headed. I am going to keep trying to use ReadBurner. Hopefully it will become “useful” soon.

P.S. If you have a feed of shared items or clippings, please leave it in the comments. Those are some of my best subscriptions these days.