Information overload? Don't subscribe. Don't aggregate. Glance!

Rowan Nairn does a great job of breaking down the different types of RSS feeds we subscribe to. His 4th category of feed is -

Friend’s and must-see feeds:
With these feeds, I want to at least glance at every item that comes through, maybe not immediately but eventually. These can be almost as important as personal email. List-of-feeds works alright here. My current personal project is addressing this latter species

Rowan uses the word glance in that paragraph and I think its more significant than he realizes. Because that, to me, is exactly the benefit of his OPML browser + RSS Reader project - OPod. For instance OPod allows you to glance at the RTE News feeds if you follow the News & Media -> All Media Feeds -> RTE hierarchy. No need to subscribe, no need to aggregate.

According to Answers, to Browse is to "inspect something leisurely and casually". But in the real world we don't have time to inspect much. Instead we Glance - "direct the gaze briefly,... move rapidly from one thing to another."

I would suggest therefore that OPod, Taskable and whatever Kosso is cooking up are a new breed of software application that we should refer to as Feed Glancers. I think we're all going to be doing a lot less subscribing in future and a whole lot more glancing instead..

Comments

[kosso]

nice :)

I really like that oPod too. smoooth!