Wednesday, February 06, 2008

The Trouble With Syndication

I came across Sam Jacob's Strangeharvest blog in a roundabout way: the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died, which led to Alex Mardas, which led to the Mardas Gap, an idea that Jacob suggested to describe the gap between a designer's idea and its realization. Strangeharvest is, at least to my mind, one of the coolest looking blogs i've ever seen. It's geometric, but not rigidly symmetric, and its form maps clearly onto its function. It's nice to look at and navigate.

Most of the blogs that i follow get unceremoniously dumped into Google Reader, and i rarely navigate to the actual blog even for full text. Of course, this is partially the fault of the bloggers. They could choose to syndicate only beginnings so that you have to go to the regular blog to read the full text. But it seems like what I really want, at least for the cases where people go to the trouble to make their sites attractive, is less like the Google reader's digest approach, and more something like the channel guide on my cable system. There's gotta be some Ajax-y feed aggregator out there that does this, right?

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