So, we're up to the 8th bit. RSSell

RSS make it really easy to be excessively inundated with information, so much so that it can take over from actually surfing the web and such. When I first started using the greatest browser yet created, Opera, I discovered that it had an RSS reader built in, which then prompted me to subscribe to all the websites I usually browsed through on a daily basis. Utter disaster.


The sites I subscribed to - admittedly they were news and current events and industry news type sites - were so big that the number of updates they sent through ended up being completly unmanagable. As the number of unread posts grew I found I started skimming the title of each post instead of going into read the blurb the posts contained, and missing a lot of really interesting information that I would otherwise have come across if I had been skimming the page itself.

On the other hand, on really the big websites that update a lot if you don't keep looking at them, specific articles often get archived or pushed off the front pages before you have a chance to look at them, so having a big list of all the articles that get posted can come in handy.


The trick for me is to either keep the rss browser open so you can stay on top of any new posts that come along, or to subscribe to sites that don't update very often so don't inundate you with a pile of messages every hour. Some sites have daily upates, while others have weekly collections. I like the daily updates myself, but again, if it's a big site it can take a while to chew through all the posts. I also really only subsribe to sites that I won't go to on a daily basis as they don't often have interesting things to read but like to keep track of for the occasional useful article.


I use an actual rss reader rather than a web version, as I always prefer an actual stand-alone program where possible becuase trying to run things through browsers - like bloglines - always seems so clunky, slow, resource heavy and uncustomisable, despite the benefits of being able to access the feeds I want anywhere. Hence most of the feeds I've sub'd to won't show on my public bloglines feeds, but heres a link anyway: http://www.bloglines.com/public/radnom

About the only thing I like about Bloglines is the ability to blog the interesting articles for easy access later.