RSS Killed the Web Browsing Star
One of the outlets/time-killers for office works the world over is browsing the web, and I’m certainly no exception. There are times when you just need a break, and hitting the various news and geek news sites often does the trick for me. There is, though, a technology that has become increasing popular over the last few years that has managed to ruin things for me: RSS.
RSS (which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on who you ask), in case you don’t know, is a means by which a web site can publish a list of links to and descriptions of articles on the site. Using an RSS reader, a user can “subscribe” to the RSS feed and easily see if there is something new on a given site that needs to be read.
Several months ago, I installed the excellent Sage feed reader for Firefox. To check the various feeds to which I have subscribed, I simply open the panel, click the refresh button and look to see what’s new. It’s really nice. The problem, though, is that since I can now easily check to see if there’s something new to read, I have no reason to take a few minutes to load various sites and manually scan the page looking for new material. My outlet has been destroyed by the advancing armies of Convenience!
My handicap doesn’t end there, though. Google had to go and make things worse with Google Reader, web-based RSS reader. Now, rather than manually opening the Sage panel and clicking refresh, I can simply leave a tab open to Google Reader, which partially refreshes periodically and updates the page’s title. Now, with that tab constantly open, I simply have to glance at the tab and look for a new number in the title (for example, “Google Reader (5)” tells me I have 5 new stories to peruse).
So now I have gone from browsing several web sites to opening and refreshing a browser plugin to looking at a page title. While this may increase my overall productivity, it’s taken some of the fun out of the web, and for that someone must pay! 🙂
(With apologies to The Buggles)