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September 23, 2007
RSS > You
Everyday, it seems, I’m bombarded with the notion that we are in the midst of the “Information Age.” While I know the meaning of the phrase and what it refers to, I’ve never really felt like I could get my information any easier than I used to. I know we’ve come a long way from logging on to the Prodigy network from a 28.8 dial-up modem, but I generally feel like I’ve always gotten my information in the same way. I wake up everyday and log on to CNN to read a few headlines, click over to Forbes or Businessweek for a quick update, take a peek at ESPN and the Freep for my sports, and surf over to Autoweek for a little useless info about cars that I can’t afford. Being a man of habit, I never had a problem keeping up this daily regimen of information gathering. In fact, I thought I had a pretty good little system going. I kept my bookmarks in order and am a certified tabbing master (Why wait for a page to load when you can be reading another one?).
But this week my carefully designed method was made obsolete after learning how to utilize RSS feeds. RSS is the Ipod to my Walkman, the Palm Pilot to my Post-It Note, the radio to my Carrier Pigeon. Using Bloglines to manage RSS feeds is so slick, I haven’t even felt like I’m doing anything different. Within 8 minutes of creating my Bloglines account and learning to manage RSS Feeds, I had forgotten all about my archaic quest for information that I used to put myself through each morning. Clicking one link to my Bloglines account and having all of my feeds there in front of me is exponentially easier and faster than my old method. Now when I hear that we’re in the midst of the Information Age (no diminishing quotation marks necessary) I feel like I’m a part of it.
Posted by stevenwr at September 23, 2007 07:52 PM