A rough plan for growing RSS Feed Readers
I've previously written Getting Started with Feed Readers, What good feed reader (RSS) support looks like on a website, and I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too.
First of all, every part of this plan involves non-profit corporations. The goal is to create a great service and get people using RSS, NOT to make money. Money is just unfortunately necessary, especially if we want to buy ads to spread it.
I'm a big fan of RSS.
At the center of this plan is a new & improved Feed Reader app for mobile. The most important part is the ability to FIND NEW FEEDS. Feedly does this, but not enough, it looks at news but not entertainment or local government as far as i can tell.
So, the search has to be exquisite. I want to see when new episodes of my TV shows drop, with the option of subscribing to related news feeds about said show. I want to know about updates to video games I play. Steam has RSS feeds. There's a site for finding RSS feeds for TV show episode releases. I don't want to have to go to my browser to find these feeds. YouTube too! And social media accounts.
So the first part of the plan is to build this app with the really good search-for-feeds, with the motto "Subscribe to anything" or something like it. And built-in should be the ability to request and/or create feeds from sites that don't have actual RSS support. There should be advanced discovery of feeds on web-pages (some sites use meta tags to list their RSS feeds, but some do not. They should all work). It should be integrated with OpenRSS.org as well. And you should be able to do a standard web-search within-the app, then choose a site/page to use as a feed (for feeds that are not well-integrated into the app already).
So. We make the app, and this is under the umbrella of one non-profit. This runs on donations. The feed-search is a public-api that anyone else can use to help with discovery of feeds, and there should be an open-source git repository in case our API ever goes offline.
While OpenRSS.org is awesome, we want to avoid this centralization of feeds as much as possible.
Then we make another non-profit that develops websites for local governments. This is where the bulk of money comes from, and excess proceeds go to the improvement of feed discovery. The websites we develop will have first-class RSS support.
As the government-websites NFP grows, we have more funding, more staff, and more ability to expand what we do, which can lead to more intentional cataloguing of feeds based on locality - search for your city or county then select which government bodies or news organizations you want to follow. Many of those will have sub-feeds.
Again, here, the only part I want to centralize is the discovery of feeds - not the feeds themselves. And if possible, individual cities or states could have their own websites that catalogue local resources so even these operations are independent, so again if the central entity fails, as much of the network stays running as possible.
I will probably never work toward this plan. Such an idea requires a lot of work. It would require making something successful to prove it works, then getting large donors or investors to start expanding. I'm disabled so I can't do that work. And I'm poor so I can't buy labor either.
Again, the whole point of this is to improve access to information. Oh, and once a certain level of success is achieved nearly everything should be open-sourced, including the software we use to develop government websites. Since the initial growth requires some funding, open-sourcing from the start may not be viable. Idunno.
It could also be possible to just do the app I'm talking about without the government-services side of things. But then the entire operation is run by donations, which could be limiting.