Wednesday, November 29, 2006

The Web in 60 Seconds

I had a discussion with my friend recently about the pros and cons of RSS Feeds.
I only discovered these recently, and with careful guidance from others managed to get set up with my own reader account. I chose google, but there are others.

I was impressed. For anyone who doesn't know, the idea is that any page with regular updates can generate a 'feed', which is readable by a third party web page. The end result of this is that you can go to one page (your reader) and anything that is new on any of your feeds gets displayed all at once.

The plus side of this is that instead of having twenty regular pages to check, I have one. Anything new is right at my fingertips.

The downside is that I have the entire internet in 60 seconds a day. The internet hit 100 million sites this week (estimated 1.1% porn, btw) and it has never seemed smaller. Now that it is brought to me, I don't search, I don't follow links, and I don't explore. It's almost too convenient.

However as with all convenient devils, this one is by far too useful to discard. I can also view my account on my phone, which means that when I get home there is nothing new waiting that I haven't seen.

Oh well. Here's what is on my subscription list:

So what's in yours?

-iRob

P.S. - Everyone can relax - I got one. (Squee!)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"I don't search, I don't follow links, and I don't explore. It's almost too convenient."

That's too bad, because some people make it a point to include links in their blog posts to encourage exploration & discovery. It's actually one of the best practices in blogging.

But I understand what you're saying - everything is updated all at once. There's no paging through sites, so all you do is refresh the page. And refresh it again. Until there's an update. Or you get bored.