Sunday, January 22, 2006

Why RSS is not email

I only found out today that you can sync up NewsGator and FeedDemon so that you can track the feeds you follow in FeedDemon from other computers (props to Plop@rb for that info!). I googled to find out more and came across some interesting articles on why FeedDemon is great and why aggregating RSS via Outlook sucks.

I'm an agnostic in this debate since I've never used an RSS aggregator other than FeedDemon (great product and great brand, call me a typical consumer but it'll be hard to make me switch :o)). However I do like Steve Makofsky's statement that "RSS is not email". In particular I work very much in line with point 2, I specifically fire up my separate blog reading app when I want to read blogs. That way I have a nice clean distinction between time spent reading blogs and time doing anything else. Also it forces me to go out of my way to read blogs rather than if it was embedded in my browser or email client where I might be tempted to "accidentally" slip into reading a few articles.

I wonder how most people fit RSS reading into their workflow. Do most people read blogs in their personal time, or when work is slack, or do you consider it relevant to your job and justify reading it during the work day?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use SAGE, which is an extension for Firefox.

It loads up blogs and headlines in a sidebar on th eleft, and then I click to read articles.

I don't distinguish reading blogs from reading webpages themselves since often there's links in the articles that you want to click on. So, I prefer having the RSS interface in the browser itself. Firing up a seperate email or RSS program would annoy me.

For Podcasts though, I use iTunes, since it's a totally different experience to regular blogs.

Conor said...

Sage sounds interesting. How does it let you organise feeds?

I tend to read blogs but very rarely follow the links so viewing sites linked to by blogs isn't a regular issue for me.