ckunte.com — Life, dreams, technology, perfection, rhythm and melody.

Each of our post categories is a signal from our websites, blogs. Most people ignore it, simply because we want to read everything. So, we subscribe to one feed that pushes everything. So far so good.

But when a site or a blog owner begins to use a great service like FeedBurner together with Steve’s excellent FeedBurner redirect plugin¹, we have a potent mix of forced data channel with no segregation of channels possible, even if desired. What I mean is now a subscriber can no longer subscribe to only specific category even if she wanted to. I didn’t realize this until I was trying to jam certain category feeds via Yahoo! Pipes.

The web is a matrix of data. Having come this far in feeds, netizens and subscribers should have the freedom to choose their cocktail, if you like, and not just Black Label straight-up.

The introduction of Yahoo! Pipes (and what you can do with it) shows us flaws in the systems we have been using to serve our subscribers. Subscribers can no longer have the data freedom in feeds. The owner then becomes the controller of all or nothing, and channels through a plugin and a service (for the service to be useful — my thoughts on that)².

In a few years time, if someone truly wants to collate stuff on a specific topic, via possibly, feed, then data analysis becomes harder, because you get potatoes with tomatoes.

This is again subject to individual choice of site/blog owners, but if you ask me, I’d keep my freedom of feed data free for my subscribers, for the internet. Use it if you like to mash my categories with others.

Update: Mark’s thoughts on a related topic.

1. I have used them for close to two years before I realized this [←]
2. From conversations with Debashish and Patrix, my responses are here, here and here. [←]