Chad Dickerson explains the value in RSS
InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson nails the value of RSS:
When I started using an RSS newsreader daily, some remarkable things happened that I didn't necessarily expect: I began to spend almost no time surfing to keep up with current technology information, and I was suddenly able to manage a large body of incoming information with incredible efficiency. My newsreader has become so integral that it's now sitting in my Windows startup folder along with my e-mail client and contact manager. I'm humming "RSS Killed the Infoglut Star" when I fire up my RSS newsreader in the morning.
That's what I've discovered as well. There are a handful of non-RSS enabled sites I still visit - Dilbert and Day by Day being my two favorites. Other than that, most of my browsing proceeds directly from BottomFeeder, based on the subscribed content I'm actually interested in. This is just so much better than going through an enormous favorites list each day. I'm starting to think that a combination of wikis and comment enabled blogs could easily replace most internal email as well - making it far easier to find out what's going on in projects I need to track. RSS is still in the what's that stage for most people, and the not Echo project will be seen the same way. That's about to change, with AOL jumping into the blogging fray. Doc Searls was right - RSS newsreaders are TiVo for bloggers. Soon, bloggers won't be the only ones.
Comments
BottomFeeder is the bomb, and yet...
[Talios] July 8, 2003 21:13:34.137
I've been using BottomFeeder for awhile now after trying out various other aggregators and find it to be one of, if not -the- best I've tried so far. Mind you, I'm on Linux so havn't been able to try out some of the shiny funky ones there, but for now, Bottom Feeder is the bomb. My only gripes with it, which are possibly more with Cincom's SmallTalk engine is that it doesn't do antialiased fonts, and has no nice Gtk2 looking theme to sit nicely with my Gnome applications. I love the backup to ftp, although it doesn't remember the path I last used for backup/restore which is annoying. My other gripe is for some reason BottomFeeder doesn't display on my machine, it runs, and doesn't display, I'm currently running it via remote X11 from my other machine, which works nicely, apart from sluggish UI redraw :(
Re: BottomFeeder is the bomb, and yet...
[James Robertson] July 8, 2003 21:58:28.693
Comment on BottomFeeder is the bomb, and yet... by James Robertson
Re remembering FTP info - it should do that - that's a bug. What kind of system won't it run on?
Red Hat 9
[Mark Derricutt] July 9, 2003 6:26:30.822
Its not running on my Red Hat 9 machine at work, runs fine on my Red Hat 9 machine at home so not sure what the problem is - its as throw no window is being opened ( or is being opened offscreen ). The process is there with no errors.
Re: Red Hat 9
[James Robertson] July 9, 2003 8:20:34.964
Comment on Red Hat 9 by James Robertson
I don't suppose it's something silly, like the DISPLAY not being set properly?
Exploring the blogsphere
[Andrew Birkett's blog] July 9, 2003 14:27:59.813
Trackback from Andrew Birkett's blog
Exploring the blogsphere
James Robertson blogs about the way which his RSS reader has changed the way he consumes information. I've found exactly the same thing over the past few months. I can't remember who it was that described the blog world......
Untitled
[Mark Derricutt] July 9, 2003 18:58:43.610
DISPLAY is set, otherwise no other X11 applications would run.. and gah - bottomFeeder just lost all my settings, restore from ftp doesn't seem to work, manually ftp'ing to my btfSave folder, running and selecting "restore all" doesnt work either :( gah, this is not my day :(