Stephen Downes

This post argues that designers have borrowed the design of previous communication systems and with that borrowed the appearance of an obligation to read, and maybe even to respond, to the backlog. That obligation may be real in the case of email or answering machines, where senders are (or at least, used to be) real people. But the obligation never actually existed for things like RSS feeds and social media - they became 'phantom obligations'. You might miss someone's important post. You might miss what's happening right now! It's a great post - and it makes us rethink the metaphors we use to describe what's happening on the internet in ways that free us from feeling guilty about not reading everything that exists. Via D'Arcy Norman, who looks at Fever's 'Hot' view of RSS, and made an interface of his own (me, I'm really enjoying my own version, that sorts recent posts according to how frequently the person posts, so I never miss the once-a-month gems in the noise of sites that publish eight items a day (like me, here in OLDaily).