RSS feedOne interesting thing about moving house and then falling sick, is the 7 day black hole caused by not having Internet access, or even a computer to play on. And while my email backlog calmly waited until I was back online, my feed aggregator did not. I say did not, but the problem of course is that RSS and Atom feeds do not give the user any ability to read items from a specific date, meaning that the last 10 to 20 items don’t cover anywhere near the 7 days that I’d like to catch up on.
So now I have a 5 day or so gap in my knowledge about what happened in the blogosphere and the Internet/I.T. world. Through CNet, SMH and other sites I can find out a little about some news that I’ve missed, but this gives no additional information such as context, social effects or any more detailed research. And for the same reason that I use an aggregator, I’m not about to visit each of the 200+ sites I read each day to find out what happened.
Every few days I stumble across an issue being referred to in a blog, which I don’t completely understand, until I follow the trackbacks to find out it was a story which broke during my gap. In many ways I feel like I ceased to exist for a week, and that’s very disconcerting, especially considering it is part of my job to be up to date, and there’s nothing I can really do about.
So when I see posts about how great RSS is for keeping people informed, I grumble and bitch to myself about how people still just don’t get it. Well, slightly more than I usually do anyway.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)