Albert Tanutama

Haven’t been blogging for a while… Does that mean the hype of blogging has passed for me? Hmmm,… I don’t think so. I still love blogging. It’s still a great way to establish a community, or personal network. In fact, I’m surprised to know that there are still few other people that read my blogs And, I’m morally ‘responsible’ to make their visit to this site worthwhile…. This makes me thought of RSS.

Like them, reading blogs is one of my primary surfing activities. I typically launched my FeedDemon (it’s a great newsaggregator, but I’m impressed more with its supports. Lots of new enhancements at no cost. Way to go against piracy) and IE. Using FeedDemon, I immediately download the latest news from my “A-List” of weblogs, like BoingBoing, Slashdot, Wired, Scoble, my weblogs (for backup purposes), and even my gmail. (Well, I do not really find it useful for the time being, but it’s kinda cool, reading your mail using news aggregator).

Using IE, I will look at different newspaper, local and from my hometown. I spent more time reading, but less information. The advertisement is really annoying, and downloading will take some time. Therefore, I only read some news that catch my attention and interest. Not a way to go ahead in the future.

Google news is another site that I’ve never missed to visit. It’s an amazing innovation. I visited it often. It allows me to get a better glimpse of what’s going on in the world, much more than other newspaper. The news are more reliable because it aggregates from different sources. Easy to find biases. It’s clean. The site structure is straight forward. I haven’t used the news search feature of it tho. Other aggregator site that is a must-see for me is fullasagoog. Great site to keep in touch with Flash and web designer community.

Well, so what’s my point here? I guess, I’m trying to say I found aggregator is really a great way to go, and I’d love to see more sites take into consideration of supporting this, that is to use RSS. One features of RSS that is less often highlighted is to preserve information. Much better than bookmark. It gives the context. And after a while, I’ll have good personal information sources that is easier to search than launching google.

I haven’t really looked into the portal. But, so far, I prefer to have multiple sites serving specific purpose, rather than one multi-purposes information portal. Maybe because I haven’t noted really great portal. At present, I’m satisfied to have google as my homepage.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2004 at 10:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.