Is there any good way to follow writers on a bunch of diff websites, so anytime they post a story I see a link or something in a single feed?
This resulted in a series of over 40 replies with recommendations for feed reader apps and generally using RSS. I added my own reply for rivers of news.
Next, a post from Cal Newport (saw this via Brad Enslen):
As any serious blog consumer can attest, a carefully curated blog feed, covering niches that matter to your life, can provide substantially more value than the collectivist ping-ponging of likes and memes that make up so much of social media interaction.
Wow! This from a person who acknowledges that he does not participate on social networks, but lets it slip that he uses RSS!
Case in point: I’ve never had a social media account, and yet I constantly enjoy connecting to people, and posting and monitoring information using digital networks.
Finally, Brad Enslen has a series of posts dealing with blogging, social media and RSS:
- Populism and Today’s Social Tech vs Blogging
- Web As Social Network: Three Best Blogging Choices
- Web As Social Network: Creating The Blog Network
What do you think?
@AndySylvester I certainly hope so. Thank for putting this together. RSS seems to be a tech that keeps on becoming more interesting and being used in different ways. Micro.blog is a fascinating example.
@AndySylvester Thanks for mentions! AT least 2 Internet generations or more have not heard of RSS. Oldsters have forgotten about it and need to be reminded.
@AndySylvester It certainly feels as if an RSS revival is going on, though there are many who would tell you it’s been in good health all along. I’ve made a couple of attempts over the past five years to start using it again. This time it looks as if it might stick.
@johnjohnston thanks! I plan to continue writing on RSS topics.
@bradenslen you are welcome! I think your series is a good one. It amazes me that Taylor Lorenz could have made the Twitter post she did, but it makes senseif she has never used RSS.
@artkavanagh when I prepared that post, I did a search on the title words, and found at least a page or two of articles on RSS in the past year. I think the revival is in people rediscovering RSS.
@AndySylvester I think that’s true and I hope you’re right. My lack of commitment arose from the difficulty in funding a reader I both liked and could afford. It’s great that NetNewsWire is making a comeback.
Rival or no, I rely completely on RSS to monitor what I read on the web. My biggest worry is encountering a site that I want to follow but does not provide a feed. I simply cannot see myself relying on bookmarks and hitting up each site like I used to before RSS. Social networks are not really optimized to automatically provide links to web sites when they are updated, they rely mostly on humans to provide those links.