RSS Feed for filePro

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At Mon, May 01, 2006 at 06:13:53PM -0400 or thereabouts, 
suspect John Esak was observed uttering:
> Anyway, kind of interested  in how much people here are into these things.

I have centericq, which is a multi-instant messenger protocol client, and
it has an RSS aggregator built in.

When I found RSS, I thought it was cool.  I still think the concept is
fine, and the technology is fair, although it could have been done better
no matter which version you're talking about.

However...actual use?  I subscribed to only 10 feeds.  I had it set up so
that when I viewed one, if I was interested in the RSS blurb, I'd hit 2
keys and it triggered lynx to fetch the article and mail it to me.  I was
interested in a lot.

Too much.

After a month of building up maybe 12 mails a day surplus that -I- ordered
but didn't get to, I realised that it was a fast path to information
overload and promptly unsubbed from all feeds.  It wasn't that the
information was disinteresting--it was cool stuff.  It was stuff I wanted
to read.  There just was NOT enough time to get to all of it.  It's a
time-sink.  It's the equivalent to subscribing to 20 magazines and having
them pile up all over the house, then eventually tossing them unread.  Or
for some people, getting the daily paper and tossing most of them unread.

Great concept, but in the end, the information age will likely collapse
under its own weight.  It's not that it's all valueless--there's really
good stuff out there.  It's that there's too much of it, and even when it's
organised and by-request-only, it's like going to the buffet salad
bar--sometimes you get way more than you can possibly eat because it all
looks so good.

If you do it, I wish you luck with it.  I just found out that despite my
initial warmness to it, I grew disenchanted with the overload very quickly.
And I withdrew entirely from using it.  No plans to go back to it, either.

mark->