Been wondering what's been making me cranky the last few months.
Now, before you start shootin' holes in my feeling, let me submit that when I'm not learning something new, I get really, really bored. (For the record, busy does not equal bored.)
It's been about nine months since this fiasco happened and all my RSS feeds went Google Way. Aaargh. That's a challenge when a lot of your learning happens by following, oh, a few hundred blogs.
Also a few months ago, I mentioned how I'd gone kicking and screaming to Twitter. What pushed me over the edge was the idea of microblogging, following others' blogs and then pushing my own (or others') information in 140-character bites in an effort to share.
But it's really not the same.
While it takes a lot of content browsing to find what you want via RSS feeds, finding valuable content via Twitter is truly like looking for a needle in a haystack. It takes much, much longer and yields much, much less.So imagine my information drought of the last several months. Heck, I'm surprised I can still read at all.
Exit my old RSS reader app. (Fine-- go to Big Brother Google!). Enter....enter...well, I'm trying a whole bunch of stuff. For starters, NewsFire and Times (screen shot shown, above).
NewsFire behaves more like my old sellout tool (I'm not at all upset about it)--makes it easy to drill down into it if you want to, although scanning info requires a few more brain cells (still looking for those). With Times, what you see is what you get--in a very slick interface. If you want to feel like you're reading the paper but online, this is your gig. Beautiful GUI...I nearly fell for it, but it's just a bit too pretty for me.
As much as I love good design, when I'm looking for information, that's all I need. Of the two RSS readers I'm trying, so far it's NewsFire.
And I'm reading three-syllable words again. That can't be all bad.
Comments