Posted 10/21/2008 at 06:44:32pm

I've heard many people make the argument about just going to the website being enough, but I don't buy it. If you are just looking to waste time with a couple sites then browsing is fine, but once you start paying attention to 10, 100, or more websites then you need a good way to save time and feeds are exactly that.

I suggested that my wife try feeds recently once she go into reading blogs and now she's hooked. The problem is one of motivation and people not understanding what they are missing. It's very similar to broadband. My parents were on dial-up for the longest time because they had adjusted their usage to it and didn't have the initiative to find out that more could be done. If RSS had existed before broadband you'd have fewer people OK with just browsing.

A potential driver for RSS in the future is the rise of smartphones. Browsing sites on a broadband enabled desktop is one thing. Trying to do it on a phone or small screened MID is something else. By using a feed reader to do the browsing everything becomes much more efficient.

You may notice a link to FeedsAnywhere in my signature. It's an online feeder my brother and I are working on to solve this problem. It has a scalable interface to work equally well on any screen size and is capable of determining which stories you'll find the most interesting. Duplicate detection and grouping similar items are also supported, although I'm still implementing the interface for grouping. To understand the benefit of grouping consider the upcoming Bloomfield or Shanghai launches. By viewing similar items the idea is to group all Bloomfield reviews together so you can find them without a lot of digging and be able to pick the most interesting ones to read.

Chad
http://linuxappfinder.com
http://feedsanywhere.com 

Posted 07/28/2008 at 10:40:04pm

I used the Wubi installer on my laptop at work and it went great. Being a work laptop I didn't want to repartition the drive, but having the ability to install Kubuntu like it's just another program made everything easier. No I can reboot into KDE4 whenever I can't take Windows anymore. Before Wubi I used VMware Player, but I just didn't have enough RAM and couldn't use 3D graphics. Having a native install now is great.

Chad

http://linuxappfinder.com

http://feedsanywhere.com