EduBlog Insights

This post, Why I Don’t Use RSS  hit on something that I have been thinking about for a while. Don’t get me wrong. I love Bloglines and find it so helpful to do a quick check daily to see who has posted. I also like being able to organize in the manner that works for me. However, sometimes I have felt like I just keep on adding links and the task of sifting through them is taking some of the joy out of actually visiting a site.  What I have done is continue visiting about 10 weblogs that are “must-reads” for me.  Bloglines helps in that I can just click on the site link and go there.  What I used to do though is spend more time browsing back through weblogs and that is where I would get a chance to rethink different posts. I miss that and plan to get back to more of that.

This writer also stated that he liked other people’s list of links and I agree.  It’s fun to discover new sites of interest and you’re pretty sure you’ll like them cause you relate to the weblogger who is listing them.

Also, he pointed out how he liked announcing his visits in referrer logs.  He called it his “internet calling card.”

I thought it was a great read, especially his concluding paragraph:

There are lots of other reasons I don’t use RSS, but underlying almost all of them is my resistance to putting in yet another layer of abstraction and technology-based information management between me and content. I still think that the value of the internet is not that it allows people to post technological standards and pass information more quickly, but that it connects people who create content with people who want to see content. I like the fact that I am inspired by the beauty of other people™≠s work, and I hope that in some small way I can provide that same inspiration to someone, somewhere. The value-add of the internet, in my opinion, is that it makes such inspirational connections more likely. And I just don™≠t get that same feeling from a technology that makes the beautiful content of creative people look like another form of email. If it works for other people, that’s truly great. But it just doesn’t work for me.

Now, I’m not giving up Bloglines but I think I can figure out a way to have the best of both worlds. It keeps coming back to information overload and how to set priorities.  It’s an area we need to think some more about, especially as relates to our students!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2004 at 4:25 pm and is filed under About Weblogs, Imported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.