feeds = lame
i’ve been using an rss reader for the last 3 weeks (sage - built into firefox) and it sucks. my experience of visiting the blogosphere is so much lessened. too bad I don’t think i’ll be able to go back.
I’ve tried using rss readers 3-4 times so far. each time I junked it after a couple of tries. this time I think it’s sticking, unfortunately.
March 12th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Try it for media instead - its better. Subscribe to some feeds in iTunes, or download FireAnt or Democracy. I’ve had the same experience with text-based.
March 12th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
It’s true that you miss some of the charm of surfing, but when you need to follow so much stuff at once … Also what’s bad is that it’s too easy to click “Mark as all read” and miss important stuff on your friends’ blogs…
March 15th, 2006 at 1:04 am
I know what you mean, Mike. I was preaching for NewsAlloy a few weeks back, but lately, I’m not able to keep up anymore. 800 feeds certainly don’t help. I’ve known for years I need something more intelligent. A memetracker, I guess.
There’s a lot of info out there, but that’s such a generic term. Keeping track of wiki changes, blog posts, technology and updates and friends posts are all different matter and I’m starting to recognise it can’t all be handled from the same space, even if it’s all RSS/Atom.
March 16th, 2006 at 12:25 am
Mike, I totally agree (and wrote about it) - but in the last six months or so I have started to use a feedreader all the time. I use it for two things now.
First, I use it (NetNewsWire for me) simply to handle the mass of material on blogs that I might not need to visit all the time but that nevertheless I like to monitor.
Secondly, and more importantly, I use it as an alert system. At a certain point before and after the sale of Blo.gs to Yahoo the service was pretty wonky, and though I really like that approach to things - learning of updates via the ping service and reading in a browser - the service was too sketchy to continue to rely upon. So I switched over, and once I got used to it I found some distinct advantages over the alert services I used.