Thursday, March 22, 2007

Rojo - Helpful, or just a total pain?

Rojo is a site designed to help you organise your RSS and atom feeds. The concept behind Rojo is fairly simple. You subscribe to it (completely free of charge), and then select news feeds that you want to be present on your Rojo homepage. You can select feeds from a list that Rojo gives you when you sign up, or you can use the Rojo search engine to search for specific feeds.

Personally, I'm uninterested in 'Gossip', 'Fashion', 'Celebrities', 'Entertainment', etc. The only feeds I'm interested in are news related, though not just limited to national news, but global. This said, I don't enjoy reading tabloid stories, or tabloid presentations of national news. With this in mind, I signed up to Rojo, and added the BBC national, and the BBC world news feeds, as well as the Times, Telegraph and Guardian feeds.

This was a mistake.

From what I can tell, Rojo does not limit the number of articles presented through a feed. This resulted in over 10,000 results. Even though the feeds were ordered by age, from my point of view, this makes it useless. I also found it difficult to unsubscribe myself from feeds. This is not to say it is impossible, just not as easy as it could be.

However, these were mainstream media feeds. If you subscribe to a small, specialised feed, you will not be hindered by a result in the thousands. However, unless your interest base was very narrow and extremely specialised you'd still find it pointless.

1 comment:

Jim said...

Well written and clearly laid out - sorry you didn't get much out of Rojo. I think you're right that you need to focus down your interests to get something out of Rojo/feed reading. Alternatively, you need to be the kind of person desperate to keep up with the latest news across a number of fields (e.g. a news journalist).

Jim