Having read Jay Small’s recent discussion of user interactivity on news websites I had one of those moments when you just think to yourself, “Yes, this is how it is supposed to work”. The prompting for this wasn’t solely the content of the newsletter, but some of the thoughts I had related to the article.
The article talked about message boards and how they resembled Usenet. For those who aren’t initiated Usenet is alive and kicking, in fact it is possible to integrate message boards with Usenet to great effect. One of the best examples I have seen of this is on the alioth.net website. This is a fansite for the classic Elite series of games with a very active message/bulletin board. I haven’t visited this site for months, but it provides an interface that suits my needs and still lets me interact with the content and with other users. I like using my newsgroup reading software, Outlook Express (Mozilla Mail still hasn’t converted me), and being able to get what I want delivered the way I want it is the key to my interaction with that particular site.
This prompted another thought, RSS is another means of doing this. I use the nntp//rss news aggregator to read my favourite weblogs with all my other newsgroups. I guess this is one of the benefits of XML, delivering content to the user and letting them consume it in the way that best suits them. What better branding is there than serving a customer well?
Miscellaneous. I have been busy these last few days, a couple of pointers for you, the Feedster RSS search engine, despite not including <content:encoded> data in the search results as a replacment for the <description> element it’s pretty cool. I’ve also created a Mozilla/Netscape search plugin for Feedster.