Thursday, July 26, 2007

#8 Make Life Really Simple with RSS and a News Reader

RSS I don't mind so much. I've played with it in the past, but I've never found much use for it. Quite frankly, I'm so inundated and overloaded with information that finding a way to drag *more* in to me automatically is nowhere near a priority for me. Most of the places that seem to push RSS are in fact the places where it is the least useful: sites that have a very high flow rate of content. No, I don't need to have every headline from every news site presented to me every morning.

Where RSS, in my opinion, really shines, is when there are a fair number of *very* low traffic information sources that you would like to be able to keep an eye on, but not have to visit all the time. RSS would let you amalgamate that into a nicely sized bundle of up-to-date information and save you time and energy.

Following the instructions for this particular thing however... adding 10 feeds alone sticks you with over 100 individual articles to browse through that I don't have any particular interest in, but still feel obligated to peruse.

I just don't see the benefit in spamming myself in this manner. On the other hand, getting Dilbert automatically is awesome. I was not aware that Dilbert had an RSS feed. One comic a day is a perfect RSS rate as far as I'm concerned.