About a month ago I became worried that I was going to miss out on some info on a blog due to not visiting so I tried to aggregate everything in one of those fancy RSS feed things. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”; I feel that “Simple” should be removed from that definition. I downloaded a copy of NetNewsWire, a free RSS reader for Mac and got together around twenty different blogs and some news sites and then added their feeds. Then everything went horribly wrong…
Firstly it just doesn’t work and oddly enough this is a big problem for me. Now some of you might be thinking I’m just having a whine but honestly, missing out on some of my feeds is bugging me. Ironically I end up going to certain websites anyway since their RSS feeds don’t work. The Laptop Magazine Blog, for example, does not update so I just end up going to the site anyway. I’ve tried with all my might but it simply does not show me any updates. I got suspicious when a blog that is updated upwards on three times a day simply didn’t show me anything new for a week. This is the most obvious problem with RSS for me, the other problem is much more sinister.
The power of blogging is the fact that people comment and hopefully foment some debate. It’s all about human interaction and I think RSS is killing this. I check my RSS feeds every morning and often I think to myself: “Saul, you handsome, debonair young man, why don’t you comment on this post?”
The truth is I couldn’t be bothered. I don’t want to make the effort to open up Firefox, wait for the site in question to load by which time I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say anyway. Yes, NetNewsWire does offer you the ability to open the site in the program but frankly it’s not full screen and I hate scrolling left and right on a webpage. In the end that only saves me one step, that being opening up Firefox (which doesn’t take that long with FireFox3 anyway). Ultimately it’s made me a bad commenter and we all know that commenting on other people’s site tends to bring more visitors to you. So not only are RSS feeds lowering the quality of the sites I visit (as they don’t have my witty comments) but I’m also lowering the amount of potential visitors I can get on my site.
My solution to the problem is as old as the Internet itself: Bookmarks! Every browser has them and everyone should be using them. There is still no better solution. In Firefox you can open every site in a category. This solves my problem and makes me happy.
RSS is killing the blogosphere, I think someone should ban it!
Enjoy this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed.
Dude, I think you’ve missed the boat. RSS is really simple and makes the blogosphere a cleaner place for all of us geeks.
I tried that laptop mag blog on my reader and it worked easily!
I suggest trying Google Reader as your reader of choice. top class, easy to use with a browser tab that allows you to search for and subscribe to any page your on.
@Nic – Bingo!
Saul…if it weren’t for RSS I wouldn’t have found this post
Google Reader rocks – give it a go. I’m the biggest RSS fan – keeps me up to date blogs I read but bigger than that are the applications RSS has in terms of cleaner, filtered automated info delivery – website to website / facebook / del. bookmarks / yahoo pipes…etc.
I’ve always said if I only do one thing this year it’ll be to sprout the benefits of RSS
RSS is a whorish bitch. There’s nothing simple about it!
I’m a Systems Engineer and I found it tough my 1st time around.
With that said – Google Reader is the way to go. With that said, I have a knot in my tummy about using “anything Google” as they already know too much about our browsing habits :/
Think I best try Google Reader. NetNewsWire has let me down heavily. Thanks for the advice guys!