Monday, March 10, 2008

RSS

I suppose I can see how people can get excited over RSS, as it feeds you very specific information at your request. However... I will not be using it as "browsing" is an important method of how I pick up new and interesting information. For example, I like to read "The Independent" newspaper online edition, and I chose "world news" as one of the RSS feeds into my Bloglines account. In reality, I will always visit the Independent website as I am not only interested in "world news", but also other interesting stories that may appear under"sport", or "arts", or "obituaries". Why would I create RSS feeds for all these categories when all I have to do is visit the Independent website? I do understand that for a lot of people time is of the essence, and if you do happen to get a great deal of your daily information from a great variety of websites, then I can see the logic in using RSS (a reference librarian for example). But for me, I gather information on a regular basis from only a handful of sites (about 10 or so), and I am interested in ALL of the content of those sites, or rather, I am interested in browsing ALL of its content.

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