Common Craft Blog
Nooked: A Corporate RSS Directory
By leelefever on February 27, 2005 - 3:44pm
A new company called Nooked is creating a (beta) directory of corporate RSS feeds. The basic premise is that companies will be publishing news more and more using RSS. As RSS publishing becomes a standard over the next couple of years, Nooked hopes to be the source for finding and organizing RSS feeds for companies and industries you’d like to watch.
Here are some first impressions...
I like the idea. It's a bit of a crap shoot right now to find RSS feeds for companies and industries without clicking around the web. The niche is there.
The language on the public site is mostly free from techno-babble (which I dig).
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) lets you publish your news and corporate information in a format that can be accessed by anyone over the Internet. RSS is published in feeds or channels, and is read using a new category of software called news aggregators.
On day one of the 14 day trial I’ve found the web interface for members is a little clunky and short on relating how the system is supposed to be used. The site could benefit from usability testing. For instance, after logging in, I can "create an entry", but have no idea what an entry is, or why I would want to create one.
If Nooked can do a better job of making it forehead-smackingly easy for companies to get started and understand the features and benefits in future versions, they could be a contender.
Nooked: A Corporate RSS Directory
Hi Lee
Thanks for the feedback - much appreciated
We're currently working on a design/usability update to improve the Nooked experience - our goal is to make it "really simple" to publish via RSS.
Thanks
Fergus
Nooked: A Corporate RSS Directory
Hi Fergus,
Something I've been thinking about are the industry segments and categories in Nooked. When an organization adds themselves to the directory, I think they have to classify themselves into an industry sector, like Business, Government and category, like local, central, etc. I think that is necessary, but more top down.
What I'm curious about is enabling Nooked users to assign tags based on how they would classify the feeds in the directory.
The idea is not much different from the tags in del.icio.us or Flickr. I was thinking that it may enable the directory to be more emergent if there was a way to tag from them bottom. As the directory grows, this could help users find things more quickly.
Any thoughts on that Fergus?
Nooked: A Corporate RSS Directory
Hi Lee
Thanks for the additional feedback.
This is something that we've been kicking around internally - do we introduct Folksonomy to the Nooked Directory
The answer is that we're open to doing this - your feedback certainly helps the decision making process - we'd be keen to get more community feedback to see what others think.....
Best Regards
Fergus