The wonder of blogging and social networking sites is the ability to find out what people we know, both in reality and virtually, are getting up to.
The downside is that one can end up visiting a huge number of sites. Some people will have their own blog sites, others will post information on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn; mini updates on Twitter; their photos on Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket; their videos on YouTube or 12seconds…. it all gets a bit much!
I like to follow quite a number of blogs and news sites, and a fantastic way to do so is using an RSS aggregator. This is a site downloads the latest updates from each site selected, and presents them in one collection. I currently use Google Reader, which is the best i’ve come across so far. Most sites these days have an RSS feed, for example, I use the feed in Facebook’s status updates, to keep me up to date with status changes from Google Reader. A feature I particularly like, is the ability to share the items you like for others to read - for example, this is my shared items page.
Another useful site is Friendfeed, which can also be used as an RSS aggregator, but is more useful for combining social networking sites.
Where in the past we struggled to find out information about things in which we were interested, the issue for now and in the future is now finding only the information we want, whilst avoiding all the surrounding ‘noise’. It will be interesting to watch the solutions created over the next few years to solve this issue.
[...] to my post last week when I talked about using Google Reader to keep up to date with blogs and other sites, [...]
[...] perhaps you’d like to follow my witterings, by subscribing to my RSS feed, (read this post for more info on what to do with an RSS feed) or by following me on Twitter, which is updated [...]