Blogcatalog and RSS stuff

Scoble blogged about Blog Catalog which is a kind of yahoo/DMOZ directory effort for blogs, very nice.

On the general usefulness of RSS, reading Scoble's site again made me realize just how much RSS has changed the way we use the web. Scoble says he is subscribed to more than 900 feeds and has some ideas about information overkill.

I remember my life before RSS aggregators, I managed to read a small amount of sites regularly, perhaps 10 at most, simply because going to each one was just a pain in the behind. I never read peoples personal pages and I never knew half of what is going on there since my main source of information ended up being slashdot. These days it is different, I keep up with around 90 feeds during the day they offer a good 2 minute distraction from work every hour or so. I am also finding myself much better informed about general happening because I can subscribe to a wide variety of feeds.

The fact that one person can have 900 feeds shows you just how far aggregators and the whole RSS technology has progressed and what it has enabled us to do. Yes RSS has flaws that is being worked on, but so far it has done a great job. I think it also says something interesting about the mental stability of someone who wants to subscribe to that many feeds, but that is another discussion :)

1 Comment

i must say, i'm behind the curve with RSS, even though my blog spouts out RSS2.

being in Linux 90% of the time, i haven't found a decent RSS reader, so i just don't bother really :)

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