How News Agregators and RSS feeds may … narrow your mind
Thomas Menguy | November 4, 2005To be fun, hype and cool today you have to read your news throught RSS feeds (ok not sure it will bring you a lot of sex apeal, or any social success in big garden party … a geek can dream). Simply going on cnn.com to get your daily dose of news, then to slashdot is sooooo old fashionned. Google and Yahoo were already aggregating many things for you, but as a technology overlord you need something less common here come the rss and blogs are coming to your rescue. Yahoo, slashdot, and many other “corporate” web sites are offering feeds, plus many individuals via their blog: it is now possible to make your own news aggregation, choosing your sources, and at a glance, you can visit all those sites in few minutes staying in your feed reader without opening your web browser … thus missing the beloved “side links”, best path to discovery.
It may sounds paradoxal, but choosing the news we will read on an “a priori” basis has a strange side effect: we only read the same things, on the same subjects/topics, forgetting the rest of the world knowledge.
I have around seventy (70!!) feeds in my agregator, and, as a glorified geek, 30 are toward technology/hardware/Palm, 20 for GTD productivity, 7 for comics … and only 10 for general news, and to be honest the later ten are many time left unred.
So OK, I loose less time wandering around the net searching for fun and cool news … but I always read the same kind of things, missing the great discoveries that can only happen jumping from link to link: my point of interests are more radical, more focused … but really less fun and rich, it’s time to react! Let’s go back to web wandering …
Thomas