15Apr / 2007

How do you RSS?

18 months ago, my fiance gave me an iPAQ 6365 PDA. I was over the moon – the first PDA i’d ever owned, it played music, took photos, and to boot had a mobile phone built into it. Even better, it had all these awesome wireless technologies built right into it… I couldn’t even begin to think of all the possibilities my new friend was going to open up for me.

I gave Skype Mobile a go, but the 6365 uses a low consumption CPU, and wasn’t powerful enough to run it. I’m forever dabbling with wireless IM, but there is no way that I could ever write as fluidly or without errors using a stylus as I can with all 10 digits. I’ve written small apps in Flash for PDA consumption – like the TV guide, but in this example finding a reliable XML feed of Australian TV has been at times frustrating and non-reliable. I’d thought that surfing Google Maps on my PDA as I hunt for a place to buy in Sydney would be novel – but it turns out that my Nokia 6280 mobile does that better… albeit at a higher cost. And along side all of these disappointments I’ve maintained my contact list, appointments and personal email via Outlook, even though i’d prefer to move to Thunderbird (thanks Windows CE).

Needless to say, I had almost given up hope for my PDA, and it started to become ill-used… and this just so happened to coincide with my whole-hearted adoption of RSS as a means of news gathering. Firefox began to use Live bookmarks, and poor PDA got left to the side… used as a glorified contact list and events manager (which I might add, my mobile also did).

Well, we all know what happened to RSS – it’s matured, and now I more often than not get my daily dose of any given blog / news source / forum / entertainment channel via this incredibly powerful new way of interacting with the internet. Of course, to traverse this new internet, Live bookmarks are not enough, and so I was introduced to Google Reader. I could have used any number of RSS Aggregators, but I like google interfaces, and I like the integrated sign in of Network Google.

An awesome tool, Google Reader allows me to continually add more and more RSS feeds. It is insatiable! At first, I tried to maintain the pace, every day opening up Google Reader, and – using the unread email paradigm – clearing my inbox. But as more and more of the internet becomes RSS-ified, there are constantly more and more sites I want to add, and every day my unread feeds keep growing and growing and growing. And no matter how much id like to, there just isn’t enough hours in the day to read every new Boing Boing post that appears.

Last year, this reached critical mass. I could no longer even pretend to keep up with my reading, and im sure my list of feeds is modest in comparison to others. So I began to read books again. One book after the other – I almost welcomed with relief the confines of the printed page. I knew where it would end, I knew that given an hour I could get 5 chapters out of the way, and that was great.

Soon though, life demanded I get up to speed with some new technologies, and so I opened up Google Reader once more… ignoring my clusters of 100+, and added another link to the mass. I played around with a Live Bookmark of all my feeds, I guess a limited window of all the bits I like the best, a list of lists. This certainly made life much easier, because now I only cared about what was in the list… I didnt have to open Reader up and know how far behind I was. If I had time, I could read a story (based on it’s headline), no pressure. This was a revolution, but the best was yet to come.

These days, I’ve cracked open my PDA again, but not to develop games, or applications, or attempt to sync it with Thunderbird (though this is something I may do in the near future). Instead, now I use Google Reader Mobile, and read my RSS feeds at leisure, at home, as i’m falling asleep, just like my books. And im really quite pleased with it! At last, a reason to love my PDA again!! And better yet, if I read a tidbit that I like, I follow the “See Original” link, and Google re-translates the original website into a mobile-specific format! Noice!

Now, not all users on the web are happy with this service, and I can see valid reasons why re-translating a site into an alternative structure can blow completely, but for the content that I read, it is soo much better than trying to load up css and images and flash.

This is how I RSS these days, and the reasons why. How about you?

Posted in Development, Thoughts

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Permalink 3 Comments

  • http://rant.blackapache.net/ OJ

    I too am a huge fan of Google Reader. I use it every day, and I still use the email paradigm of clearing my inbox every day (perhaps even twice a day of time allows).

    IMHO, the reason why most people fail to keep up with their feeds is because they feel that must read everything. Emails and RSS feeds are very different beasts. Depending on what floats your boat, emails are from people who are writing to you for a specific purpose, or to give you some information or news on what’s going on in their lives. These emails should generally always be read. On the other hand, you get spam, chain letters, mass mails and other bits of junk as well. What do you usually do when you get emails that you don’t want to read or you know are just a waste of time? You delete them!

    Just because you subscribe to an RSS feed it doesn’t mean that every single article that comes through that feed is going to be interesting and readable. I currently have around 50 feeds in my reader – far less than most geeks! But that gives me more than enough to read (for the most part, lots of the stuff that appears in my feed reader happens to be the same story that another site has already covered). I have no problems marking entire feeds as read, or skimming through a feed looking at headlines without reading the whole article if I don’t see something that interests me. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that.

    So, in short, what I’m saying is that people need to learn that subscribing to a feed doesn’t mean you should read and retain every word that appears through that feed. Skim, delete, mark as read, do whatever you want! There’s no need to feel inundated and overwhelmed with the amount of information coming through. You can have a stack of feeds and yet easily trim it down to 5 or 10 meaningful or interesting articles per day, which is more than managable for most people.

    I love my RSS feeds because they give me news and information that I like hot off the press. It’s also a good way of finding out which sites are on the ball and which aren’t. How many times have you seen a story or an article appear on one site, only to see it appear on another a week or so later? It happens all the time, and after a while you realise that you can unsubscribe from a given feed because even though their site gives you what you want, they’re behind the times compared to others.

    What are your thoughts on RSS feeds for groups or discussion lists?

    OJ

  • dan

    Yeah, if there is one criticism of the bleeding edge, it’s that the speed of the news is soo fast, that it makes other sites (who post it even a day later) seem slow and out-dated. I guess that’s just a question of the quality of the reporting. (Slightly off-topic… but did you notice how long it took Ismail Ax to make it into Wikipedia? Now THAT’s bleeding edge).

    Im a little unclear what you mean by feeds for groups… do you mean categorising your feeds into topics? Or are you thinking along the lines of the good old newsgroups I have such fond memories of? I loved them. Funny – didn’t like forums that much (although that’s changing now – what with forum RSS!!!), really love blogs, hate MySpace, haven’t interacted with Twitter, but newsgroups are where I got most of my early coder knowledge from.

  • http://rant.blackapache.net/ OJ

    By groups I mean newsgroups, and the discussions lists are the same, but they’re usually read through email or usenet. You can now get to them through RSS feeds, but I’m not sure if it works for me.

    I’m really not a fan of MySpace, or the idea behind it but based on the stats, it looks like I’m in the minority. Then again, most geeks do avoid sites like that :)

    Twitter doesn’t really do anything for me either.

    Usenet, Google Groups, and RSS are what make up the majority of my web experience these days.

    I think your point about the quality of reporting is a double-edged knife. Quality doesn’t necessarily mean the speed at which it’s posted. In the past I’ve experienced quite a few “breaking news” stories where the facts are SOOOO wrong it makes the site look ridiculous and they quickly lose credibility. If you’ve got breaking news, it should be kept simple, and if the facts aren’t known, the author shouldn’t speculate. I’d rather wait another day and get the real facts. Bleeding edge news and reports doesn’t always constitute accuracy.

    Now, I’d best be off before I find my soapbox again :)