Management of Feeds

My first concern is that the huge range of information streams available by feed is always changing, growing and shifting. Though there are some clear examples of feeds that are essential, the number of important feeds that emerge in practice can themselves become difficult to manage and synchronize. New search terms, newly discovered blogs, a new internal reporting feed are all easily enough subscribed to as an individual – but staying on the same or appropriate pages as an organization grows seems a real challenge. Further, most externally generated feeds with emerging importance are unpredictable.

A number of people are working on creating what they call dynamic reading lists, OPML files that can be distributed but have their constituent feeds or other elements changed by a central administrator. As far as I can tell, it won’t be until something like this becomes viable that a key element of management by feeds will be addressed. A list of key feeds for all parties in an organization or a sub-group is likely to be so dynamic and complicated that the energy and thought required to manage them will be a real barrier for widespread adoption. Many people will revert to sending each other URLs by email.

Perhaps a script could be written to synchronize a user’s RSS reader with a central OPML file each time an intranet home page is visited. Perhaps enterprise RSS readers are or will begin to synchronize feeds in such a manner, but that may not be flexible enough for many distributed teams that don’t care to use the same feed reader.

I have a way to manage 500+ feeds in my reader without feeling overwhelmed, but how often do you hear about other people for whom that’s not the case? There’s an emerging industry of services dedicated to tackling the feed overload issue for individuals. That individual level of RSS troubles is only the beginning.

One way or the other, I worry that the proliferation of feeds represents another level of complexity that has to be managed across a team that is significantly more difficult than individual RSS use.

End Users

My second concern is that management by feed requires team members to document essential information in a feed-deliverable way. This may seem like a non-issue for some tech teams, but in any other kind of organization I worry that it is a serious hurdle. Even most tech companies are made up of a diverse group of people, most of whom are not accustomed to blogging about their work.

Will team members remember to tag items of interest with the agreed upon tag if tag feeds are part of the management process? Will they take the time to use the essential fields when making changes to a company wiki? The web is filled with audio files without proper ID3 tags, for example. All of these practices may be part of a general shift towards a digital workplace filled with portable data, but I worry that despite the enthusiasm some of us have, the general culture we find ourselves in may take awhile to catch up with the requirements of management by feeds.

In a world where non-human-created data and updates are increasingly available by feed, I worry about a further bifurcation of the work force; where machines and the most tech savvy members of a team will be disproportionately weighted in decision making because they are the ones contributing the most information through the primary channel (feeds). I know that this is a larger issue in management, but I am concerned about how the issue is effected by moving into a technology that is not yet widely embraced.

Some have heralded recent technical developments (such as the inclusion of RSS support in Internet Explorer and Outlook, for instance) as indications of an impending mass adoption of RSS. However, I am not certain that they are going to be effective in preparing diverse workers for management by feeds.

These changes will no doubt increase the sheer number of people who use RSS, but, just as MyYahoo has probably done, I’m concerned that the implementation being so safe and simple that may greatly limit the functionality of RSS. Browser-based feed reading is, by and large, an entirely different animal from the practice of reading enough feeds, organized appropriately for serious use.

Inclusion in Outlook is likely to replicate a false analogy between email and RSS. Email is generally not differentiated finely enough for the kind of prioritization that needs to happen when reading feeds. As Lisa Williams (an expert researcher I recently interviewed) told me, feed readers that present feeds like email create a false contract with users, specifically the expectation that every item in every feed must be read!

High-level RSS use requires a shift in paradigms. Perhaps not as drastic as the one that older generations always point out in young people who engage in multi-media multitasking with real time communications on mobile devices, but a real shift none the less.

I think that management by feeds has huge potential, but that widespread adoption of the practice won’t occur until the technical complexity of a post-scarcity, dynamic and subscribable information landscape can be better managed and end users are some how accommodated at varying skill levels.