I just figured exactly why RSS is so popular. When I opened a bloglines subscription and started adding Technorati’s top 100, all these ugly and hard-to-read blog layouts became simple plain text. Feeds, RSS, and other aggregation mechanisms aren’t just good for centralization, but also for usability.

Take for example, http://www.andrewsullivan.com/. Currently rated blog number 11 in the Technorati top 100, the layout is extremely disorienting. The background and headings are two shades of closely related blue, so there’s not enough contrast to differentiate titles quickly. The sidebar is cluttered, in small type, and non-linear, so you can’t navigate the site easily. The posts themselves are in white, with white links, which is harder to read than black text with coloured links. Bloglines, however, changes all that. When I load up AndrewSullivan.com, I see clearly distinct post sections, large headers, black on white text, and colored links. I can read the blog quickly, and comprehensively. Suddenly, a monster of a blog becomes usable.

Take a look at these comparison screenshots, starting with his regular site:

Now compare it with the bloglines rendering:

XML syndication allows you take a website, extract the interesting content, and wrap in whatever display format you wish! That’s its real beauty–as a transformation tool for usability.

Other takes on the RSS Usability issue:

• http://www.basement.org/archives/2005/01/rss_vs_design.html
• http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/blog_design_in_.html
• http://www.makeyougohmm.com/pivotblg/entry.php?id=612

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 12th, 2005 at 2:41 am and is tagged with transformation tool, technorati top 100, longtail, real beauty, centralization, number 11, bloglines, design html, aggregation, headings, layouts, usability, shades, mechanisms, sidebar, monster, syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.