Feedland Notes

Feedland went public today. I’ve been lucky enough to have been testing it and following its development for the last few weeks.

Feedland is a lot of things, all to do with RSS feeds. First it is a place to gather and organise feeds. Second it can be a place to read these feeds. Third it allows you to publish a ‘news product’ which you can share so that others can read the news from sets of these gathered feeds. Fourthly it is a place were you can see what feeds other users have gathered.

Feedland was built by Dave Winer who

pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software;
So it has an interesting pedigree and is opinionated software. Dave has had as long a relationship with RSS and OPML as anyone on the web and in an excellent position to have opinions.

Feedland is developed with an eye to interop. Feeds to get information out abound. For example the widget on my sidebar uses the Sync OPML to Blogroll plugin to sync my blog role from the opml list of feeds I’ve subscribed to in Feedland. I could also use this to control the feeds I view in an rss reader like inoreader which supports external opml.

Dave says:

FeedLand is all about people, feeds and news.

One of the most attractive, to me features, is the possibility of communities being loosely organised around the sharing of feeds. It is easy to see the feeds another user has gathered and to add them to your own list with a handy checkbox.

Feedland is still developing. I’d recommend a look at the docs and there are some interesting views starting to appear for the early adopters.

I’ve only touched on a few to the things about Feedland I’ve found interesting so far. There is a lot more to this app already and lots more to come.