RSS Observation

[mizarchivist]

I had been quite keen on RSS as a way to clean up a lot of my regular read sites. However, the past few months, pretty much since I was teaching the online class in Feb., I haven't been so interested in reading the celeb blogs (Wheaton & Gaiman particularly) in that format.

I let posts pile up, then there are too many and I frequently just bail and mark them as read. So, they go back to bookmarked on their own and read after the comics in the morning. If I have time.  RSS seems to work a lot better for me for short-attention span theater: Cute Overload, comics, LOLcats, Whedonesque. That sort of thing. If I need to expend more energy to really read a paragraph, I almost inevitably ignore. Robin had noted she's less keen on RSS for things like celeb blogs because it rips the entries out of the pretty formatting each person has created. That had also given me food for thought. Perhaps when it is removed of the author's decorative details, I in turn am less interested. It may also have something to do with all entries being collapsed so I can't pick up any interesting keywords as I look down the page.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents on that thing there.

Comments

[penk.livejournal.com]

I'm a total RSS aholic now, I have a blog post brewing about it in fact. I haven't gone the total route and plugged in LJ to it (though there's some capability to do that with paid accounts, apparently), but I read just about everything else through my reader.

I've occasionaly felt guilty about purging an entire stack of msgs, but I think my reading habits are a little different than yours - I tend to read tech sites (engadget, slashdot, etc), as opposed to 'people talking' sites.

[drwex]

I wonder if it depends on your RSS reader? I'm using iGoogle, which gives me a newspaper-like interface to my various RSS feeds (well, a bit like google news). What I get is effectively headlines/subjects for each post, each of which is a click-through link to the original.

I don't explicitly mark things as 'read' but links change colors when I've clicked on them. I do see articles in their original format/context because the click-through takes me directly to the source blog.

I still don't read all (or even close to all) the blogs whose RSS feeds I pick up.

[mizarchivist]

Yes, I use google, as well.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I've been playing with various ways of using RSS to handle my LJ habit.
I've also been toying with the idea of building an rss aggregator for my friends page.