April 01, 2004
Goodbye RSS, Hello Kinja
At long-suffering last, Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan have launched Kinja, "the weblog guide."
After going through the quick sign-up process (apparently my invite to be an alpha user must have gotten caught by my spam folders or something...ehem), first reaction is, I like. Concept is simple, basically the same as an RSS reader (but without the RSS, although it can import your existing RSS feeds): add the URLs of your favorite blogs, and Kinja automatically tracks them for updates, providing a short summary (with a logo of the blog you're tracking) and a link back to the complete post. I can only imagine what a mess it was to regularize blog post summaries on the backend (hence the year-plus of development).
Nick said to me on the phone the other day, for a bloggish-interview for an upcoming story I'm writing, that the objective of Kinja was "to take the 10% or 5% of Internet users who currently read blogs and make it 50%." By jove, it just might work.
One thing I find potentially troubling: by default, Kinja makes your reading list open to the public (for example, here's what I've subscribed to). I didn't notice any prominent disclosure to that effect when I signed up (needless to say, I just checked the box for accepting terms and conditions without reading them). I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I suspect privacy zealots will have something to say about it. What is this, compliance with the Patriot Act? (On further inspection, I see there is a "Share" page where you can opt to keep your page private. My bet is soon they change the default to private with the option to share.)
:-)
Check back tomorrow for photos from tonight's launch party.
Oh, and another thing, what's up with the .knj file extentions? Is that pure branding, or what? I didn't know you could just make up your own file extensions and browsers would still read them...
UPDATE:
I couldn't be bothered to take pictures, especially after I saw Blue Jake had the situation handled. Nick's new pad, btw, is appropriately fabu.
Spelling blunder: "...I'm writing, tht the objective..."
Posted by: Steve Hall at April 1, 2004 02:01 PM
I would call that a "typo" not a "blunder," but fine, you get a point.
Posted by: Rick Bruner at April 1, 2004 02:08 PM
I think you can do the same thing now on My Yahoo.
Posted by: Mark at April 1, 2004 03:37 PM
You can configure any web application server to interpret whatever extensions you want, regardless of the underlying technology. Even better is not to use extensions in your canonical URLs.
Are you sure it's a summary (in the semantic meaning), or rather just a well-formated abstract? I'll have to compare what comes up on Kinja vs. sources.
Posted by: Olivier Travers at April 1, 2004 04:02 PM
OK, from what I can fathom at a quick glance, Kinja takes either the first sentence or two sentences of a post, presumably based on the length of the first one. Those are abstracts, not summaries. There is software that creates automatic summaries (e.g. http://www.copernic.com/en/products/summarizer/index.html) it's a lot more difficult that looking for a dot at the end of a sentence and counting characters in a string (maybe Kinja does more, such as looking at punctuation, you would have to feed it weird things such as a very long opening sentence or all lower cap text to see what it does with it). Even if your second sentence is the start of a quote, Kinja will take it but not the rest of the quote, which suggests it doesn't handle many exceptions. And all the examples I've seen are taken from the beginning of the post, so there's apparently no attempt at finding the most relevant or significant abstract within the post.
Posted by: Olivier Travers at April 1, 2004 04:30 PM
Fine, Olivier, it abastracts, not summarizes. You want a point for that?
Posted by: Rick Bruner at April 1, 2004 04:44 PM
Not a point for that, but I'll take one for "abastracts", thanks. And add another for the missing "is."
Posted by: Olivier Travers at April 1, 2004 04:54 PM
You better bring an expensive bottle of wine when you visit in May...
Posted by: Rick Bruner at April 1, 2004 05:17 PM
Ha! Joke's on you. I already amended the rules that mistakes in comments threads don't count.
Posted by: Rick Bruner at April 1, 2004 05:20 PM
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