RSS Fatigue


Coming home from a delightful ten day excursion through British Columbia I was confronted last week by the usual backlog of correspondence and reading material. The email wasn't too bad, about 60 non-spam items with only a half dozen requiring replies. At the post office they hadn't even had to clear my box: four bills, two magazines, several advertising flyers and one real honest to goodness letter. Handwritten!

I'd suspended my sub to the Windsor Star but I'd managed to stay current by checking out the paper's web site during a visit to the Lasqueti Internet Centre.

But on starting up NetNewsWire, my newsreader, I was presented with a daunting list of rss feeds from the 187 blogs, web sites and podcasts I like to follow. There were over 3 thousand postings waiting for my eyes.

I've since got it down to 848, no wait, make that 917. It just updated again.

And none of those feeds comes from the mainstream media. A while ago I dropped the New York Times, NPR, CBC, BBC, etc because I never made it that far down, to the bottom of my sites list. On the few times that I did get that low I'd already read the articles that interested me because they had been linked to by the bloggers higher up.

I don't want to do much more pruning. In fact today I added two more sites, the Counterterrorism Blog and Progressive Bloggers. I can't remember how I got to the former but the latter was via fellow popinjay Nav.

Now I agree with SIAW that rss feeds are a wonderful invention. I only wish that more bloggers followed my example and wrote less often, relying on rss to publish their fine contributions to the sum total of human knowledge at a more sedate pace.

So I was happy to discover this morning that the "blog every day" meme may be on the way out:

Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore

by way of Dean's World


Got to get back to the web. The posting list is now at 1101.

Posted: Fri - July 7, 2006 at 01:20 PM          

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