It took me a while to fully take advantage of RSS feeds. For a while I was never completely satisfied with any of the readers available, be it on the Web or desktop, and I often found many sites did not necessarily have their feeds properly configured.
I finally settled on using My Yahoo! as my RSS launch point. I could categorize feeds into different pages and access it on any computer. However I recently found the site to be a little buggy and in some cases the feeds would not properly update, even though I knew the site was putting up new content by the hour.
I found myself going back to my bookmarks or simply typing in the URL to see of my favourite sites / blogs had been updated – not the most efficient method. This led me to once again look for a desktop client or Web service that I liked. I finally settled on Google Reader, having not tried it out in a while.
Now I’m zooming through nearly 200 RSS feeds spanning categories such as national news, Web 2.0 bloggers, auto racing and photography. It’s very efficient and I can easily bookmark, share or star content to read later.
But is it too efficient?
RSS feeds through Google Reader allows to me monitor a lot of information very quickly, but no longer am I am exploring the Web sites I used to so frequently. I am getting my information in simple fonts with the occasional image – no sidebars or peripheral content to take me off in a new tangent.
In my quest to streamline my information gathering, am I taking the fun out of my daily Web experience, and more importantly, am I missing out on new ideas?
Technorati Tags: Google, Google Reader, media, news, RSS, Web 2.0, Web surfing, Yahoo
