SquidRoad

Less RSS = Less Learning

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.

Late adopter? You just might slip off

...the tech curve--completely!

What an interesting couple of weeks this has been. I'd always been on the cutting edge of tech stuff, especially social media tools. Used to blog all the time. Ck the archives.

Then I traveled--a whole bunch, for a couple of years. Couldn't keep track of my time zone, much less what I was reading. Result? No writing.

And now, that growing list of blog feeds is being managed by GoogleReader--not excited about that. Try going from a nice, neat little desktop app to a flash-based tool that may not really be all that flashy, much less functional.

Not only have I not figured out an efficient way to even browse the 350+ blogs I follow, I'm turning completely to Twitter (oy!) for my sources. That's not entirely bad. But this is where my early-adoption of tech changed to late-adoption.

Back when Facebook experienced its boomer/GenX onslaught a couple years ago, my brother told me I should join Twitter. I thought, no way--I'm not updating even more frequently than FB! And I avoided it, until earlier this year I realized that, heck, even if I can't blog like I used to, I can micro-blog using this quick little tool.

I love to read lots of info and share it w/others who can benefit from it. Would love to say I'm an info-sponge, but I'm more like a pipe. A leaky one.

Anyway, I've been making up for lost time ever since. Now I'm figuring out what my objectives really are w/social media, whether I'll ever blog again (decided I will, both here and kind of 'flash-blogging' at Posterous) and what it all looks like when other priorities compete for my very short attention span.

Excited to have a go at it again, but I won't lie: I got the jitters about keeping it all up. For now, I'm back in the game and looking forward to it.