A is for Alice, and Alice likes her news
April 5th, 2004I enjoyed reading this first part in “Alice’s” attempt to understand RSS and News Aggregators. I especially like the last part:
“At some point during this process, Alice will start to feel assaulted by altogether new and special kind of information glut. There’s really no way around this stage, not if she wants to persevere - what she ought to do now, in my opinion, is:
“Watch each feed for usefulness - if over the course of a week or two it turns out she’s not reading it, drop it.
“Pay attention to her aggregation tool - it ought to have categorization and customization available, letting her put some things in the foreground and some in the background, weeding and separating things so that she’s not overwhelmed, and scheduling updates to take place when it’s convenient or her. If it’s not doing the proper job, she ought to look around for a better tool - they’re slowly emerging.”
Alice gets it. The key for keeping current using RSS is to continuously monitor the landscape. If feeds aren’t working for you, purge. If a new aggregator comes along that looks promising, try it out. Aggregation will always be a work in progress. If it weren’t, I’d be bored by by now.