Chris Barton believes RSS could be the solution to his blog overload problem. In
this NZ Herald article he talks about his woes with "blog overload", and goes on to state why he's avoided dealing with it for some time:
But the new blog also gave me a new headache - too many blogs to read and keep up with. Blog overload. I have known for some time the answer to this problem is RSS, but I've resisted because I hate geeky abbreviations.
"Geeky abbreviations"? One would think that being an IT Editor means you should avoid making stupid statements like those, and that you should probably have been aware of RSS when it started being widely used about a year ago. I'm not sure what it is about this article that bugs me the most - it could be the technical inaccuracies, like referring to RSS as being a "hidden piece of code" (it's a freely viewable page for crying out loud, no different to any other page available on the Internet), or simply the "I'm to cool to acknowledge the requirement for acronyms" type attitude he seems to take, or possibly that smug photo at the top of the page. Whatever it is, the article does a great job of totally underselling RSS, making it sound like something for geeks only.
In fact I would have thought the opposite is true. Personally, I have a bookmark management system that allows me to syncronise my Bookmarks (or if you prefer to use Microsoft speak, your 'Favorites') across multiple computers, as well as categorise and manage them and access them via HTTP anywhere in the world. I wrote this myself when I wanted to be able to access my bookmarks from any computer I was using at the time, be it my desktop, my laptop, my PDA, or my computer on one of the client sites I worked on. However, the average computer user probably isn't going to have something like this available, so anything else that helps them manage things like this is probably going to be a pretty handy tool. I really think RSS is a great tool to help increase the accesibility of web sites to the less computer savy browsing public. Even for extremely technical users, having your RSS feeds all setup in a well configured aggregation tool can make checking your daily list of sites a lot quicker, a lot more productive, and help you avoid a sense of information overload.
At the end of the article Chris Barton asks people to submit their choices for top aggregation tools. I'm not going to, but I'll make a couple of quick mentions:
Trillian Pro using the RSS Plugin: This works really well - I love having the RSS information presented in the form of a collapsable contact list, and I like being able to set popup boxes to notify me when new entries have been posted on a site. If something interesting pops up in the middle of the day and grabs my eye, I can simply click on it and wander off, if not, the box disappears in a few seconds and I can go back to it later in my contact list if desired. The aggregator itself is very simple, but it seems to work well for me.
Madicon RSS Reader: Madicon gets a mention because it's a simple Notes database. The idea of not having to install a completely seperate client in order to use RSS is something that definately appeals to me, and I think if I wasn't using Trillian then I'd definately find a use for this. It's not free, and it's written by a German, but don't let either of those 2 things put you off ;)