Everything That's On My Mind

OK, I admit it. I'm a techno-geek. I own one of the original PalmPilot PDAs. I still have it in a drawer somewhere…cracked screen and all. Technology is all over my life. Every now and then, however, I'm uncharacteristically slow in adopting a new technology. I've been hearing the term RSS for years, but never really took the time to understand the technology. Now that I do, I wonder why it took me so long. RSS (and ATOM) feeds are great time-management tools if you know how to use them.

I'm a voracious reader, particularly when it comes to news items and magazine articles on topics that interest me. Long ago, I learned about the benefits of pre-reading and skimming. Pre-reading is a technique for quickly determining the topic and general content of an article to determine if it is worth spending time reading it in depth. Some people call this skimming but in my opinion skimming is a different skill, somewhere between pre-reading and normal reading. Both pre-reading and skimming are important time-management techniques. If you read as much as I do, you need learn them.

With the advent of the Internet, we have access (and most of it free) to more information sources than anyone could have imagined just a couple decades ago. For someone like me, this can create a time-management nightmare. There are easily 50+ web sites that I visit on a regular basis, from The Detroit News to Christianity Today to Rotten Tomatoes, not to mention all the other bloggers I read. That’s where RSS comes in. Most online publications (including bloggers like me) now offer an RSS feed, which provides the title and the first few paragraphs of the content. With a good RSS reader/aggregator, you can be notified when a new article is posted and quickly determine if it’s worth reading or not. This can save you lots of surfing time.

So I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’m just now getting up to speed on this technology, but better late than never, right? If you’re an information-aholic like me, you need to check out this technology. I haven’t actually calculated how much time I’m saving, but I’m confident it’s significant. Here are a few of the RSS aggregators I’ve tried, with some comments. Since I’m a cheapskate, these are all free.

• My Yahoo lets you add RSS feeds to your home page but you only get article titles, so I didn’t find it all that helpful.
• The Firefox browser has some RSS support (called Live Bookmarks) built-in, but it’s not very feature-rich. Habari Xenu is a plug-in for Firefox that is much superior to the built-in support.
•  There are stand-alone Windows applications like Feed Explorer and Sharp Reader. They’re nice, but I prefer something that’s integrated into software I already use regularly.
• Right now, I’m using intraVnews (thanks for the tip, Bob), which is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. Since Outlook is always running on my PC, this has been the most convenient aggregator I’ve tried. Until I find something better, I think I’m sticking with this one.