Is there something I'm not getting?
I've set up RSS feeds for some of my often visited sites, and, yeah, I get that now I can go to Google Reader and see if there's new postings from there but it never seemed that difficult or time consuming to check out my favorite sites using the favorites function. Plus, blog content as displayed at Google Reader seems stripped of context. Sure, the entries now "come to me" but considering the whole concept of ambient findability, isn't everything, everywhere, immediately accessible anyway? I.e., I'm already plugged into the hive brain by virtue of being online. And I still have to go to the Google Reader site.
Admittedly, I'm not a hardcore user. There's only a handful of sites to which I'm truly devoted. And I suppose I could see how this could be very useful to someone whose job requires them to be monitoring a large number of sites. So that English teacher who gives her students the assignment of starting a blog and then needs to be checking all of them--for her, a good thing indeed.
For me, a little baffling. But I will keep fooling around with it and update here if my initial impression changes.
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1 comment:
I've had much the same reaction to RSS feeds--isn't that why I have bookmarks?--so I'm glad I'm not alone. That said, I do have an iGoogle page that comes up as my starting web page, and it's kind of nice to see at a glance if there's some topic that everyone is talking about.
Dan reports that some of the appeal of RSS is in being able to download everything onto a PDA or such for offline reading, but since I'm nearly never away from a computer I wouldn't know much about that. :)
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