My friend Jeremy introduced me to the RSS Aggregator, or "Blog Reader", in the summer of 2004. I fell in love with the concept of having the internet delivered to me. Clearly, I wasn't the only person making this discovery, although I consider myself ahead of the curve in this area. I want these applications to make it big, but it hasn't yet. My test for whether something in technology has caught on is 3 fold:
- Do high schoolers use it? - A low bar to clear
- Do people with little money or need for technology (e.g. cab drivers) use it? - Slightly more indicative
- Do grandparents use it? - An absolute litmus test for adaption
Consider digital music: I'm 27. Napster hit the scene when I was in college (1997-2001). Even by the time I was graduating, the term MP3 would have failed all three of the above tests. Now, in 2006, there are kids who were born after I graduated college that own iPods.
I think people will be so much better informed once everyone is checking RSS feeds as often as they check email now. It's a little like subscribing to magazines and newspapers, only if they were sent to you several times a day.
Well, as I see it, there are two kinds of blogs: topical aggregators, and personal journals. I like reading both kinds.
Topical Aggregators: I've read theories before about how content (music, movies, etc.) will all be free in the future, and the only thing we'll pay for his the service of someone sifting through all the crap to tell us what is worth our time. That's a lot of what is happening online right now. I could spend a whole day reading news about the Mac-using community, but all the best rumors and other tidbits eventually show up on TUAW.com (The Unofficial Apple Weblog). The same is true for any other topic out there. If you care about it, there's someone aggregating all the news you'd be interested in.
My favorites:
- TUAW.com - Apple news, rumors, and tid bits
- Engadget.com - New gadgets, and news about old ones
- Digg.com - Stories from anywhere around the web are voted on. Looking up the most popular in each category is insightful. I particularly enjoy the tech section.
- Slashdot.com - Similar to Digg, but older, and more tech-focused.
Personal Journals: Other kind of blog out there is the personal journal. I know people who send out emails to all their friends at once when they've gone on a trip, had a baby, or done something else significant. These journals are no different than mass emails, except they're publicly viewable, and generally written more frequently. I subscribe to these when I think the authors either have interesting lives or opinions.
My favorites:
- Vinography - A San Francisco wine lovers journal of favorite bottles, trip to vineyards, local tastings, etc.
- Blog Maverick - Mark Cuban, billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, discusses his thoughts on basketball, business, technology and general philosophy.
- Marginal Revolution - An economics professor discuss funny econ news around the country, such as markets for goofy products and services, or the application of economic theory in out-of-context situations.
The RSS technology can also be used to simply update you to anything new on the web. Whenever my favorite sportswriter, Bill Simmons, has posted a new column, his RSS feed alerts me and I go read it. I also have something like this for Flickr. I can "subscribe" to the "10-25 Favorites" pool, which will show me which pictures are becoming popular on Flickr. Or I can subscribe to my brother Billy's feed, and see what sort of art or pictures he's been posting. This is a creative use of RSS, but these aren't blogs.
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