RSS is Ruining Me

March 30, 2004

Currently, I am using NetNewsWire to manage all of the RSS Feeds I read. It is wonderful as I can look at a great deal of content in a short period of time. Its this ease of use that's a problem.

As of today, I have 212 subscriptions in NetNewsWire. This means I am pulling in information from over two hundred locations. In the past, I would never have considered this because I didn't have the time or desire to look at 200 sites every day. Who has four or five hours to spend surfing blogs and other news sources? So, RSS was a godsend at first because I could read the thirty sites I frequented in one-tenth of the time. Now that I have four times as many, it once again takes over an hour to read all of sites.

I believe the problem is that news readers don't allow me to forget sites I like. Instead of seeing a cool site and throwing it at the bottom of my bookmarks, I have my news reader checking once an hour to see if its updated. And since there are thousands of interesting sites, I am amassing quite a list of sites to look at.

So when I say that RSS is ruining me, I mean it in the best way. My real complaint is that the combination of RSS and a growing number of fabulous sites has lead to even more time-suckage. I just can't imagine what it's going to be like in another year when I have 500 RSS feeds. Someone's going to have to figure out a way to infuse all of this text into my brain, Matrix-style.

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