I think I have been using RSS even before there was RSS. I remember participating in an online professional development course from the UofT when I was working as a library tech (1997?) that was about getting information, such as current events, pushed to you instead of hunting it all down one website at a time. At the time the emphasis was on services that crawl sites and send an email when there are changes, such as www.watchthatpage.com, which I still use if a site doesn't have RSS.
Then I moved on to Bloglines and filled it up with feeds that I barely had time to follow. A few months ago when it hit the news that Bloglines was shutting down I switched to Google Reader. Bloglines did survive, but I kind of like the Google version. I currently subscribe to about 35 work-related feeds and I just checked and I have 1000+ unread items. And I even did some housekeeping (unsubscribing and reading) when I moved the feeds ...
So, I suppose that's the challenge - staying informed without getting overwhelmed. Now that I'm signed in I'm going to clean things up some more. This tool will be way more useful to me if I narrowed it down to a few focused useful feeds. And if I remembered to check in, say for 10 minutes a day, and actually read current news.
Neat - I've never really thought about how RSS feeds began. Thanks for your story. You got me interested enough to look it up on Wikipedia - just learned that Mozilla Firefox was the first browser to use the orange RSS icon.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure I've never seen my Reader with less than 1000+ unread items. Guess I'd better do some clean-up too. Or maybe I should actually read some of that news. Hmm.