Over the last couple of days I’ve read some particularly sad stories online. Well, one of them is a story and the other is a web site that’s an ongoing story. Of course I read sad news throughout the day, because a lot of news makes me sad or angry lately, especially with regards to the war, but these are more personal. I wrote an email to Michael when I happened upon In My Place saying something about how just over ten years ago I was blown away by the web. I still am. There’s so much out there now though. There’s a lot of crap, to be sure, but there are also needles in the piles of shit. It’s been very easy to try and read everything lately, but it’s starting to drive me crazy. RSS is a great way to sift through things, but there’s a drawback as well. Glancing at my list of subscriptions and having NetNewsWire tell me I have 674 articles to go through makes me feel obligated to at least go through the list. Matt said something about this recently:
Readers have a lot of basic problems: putting a count on every feed and item like weblogs are suddenly my work inbox that I have to keep down to zero, the counts are recorded by the program, so jumping from one computer to another means you lose count of your feeds, and viewing comments or the rest of a message requires jumping to a browser anyway.
I feel like I’m going to miss something if I don’t at least look at the articles. I want to be informed, and for a while I felt like using an RSS reader was so much more efficient, but now I feel like it’s made me into an obsessive freak.
