River of News
I hadn’t seen this article by Dave Winer until just recently when it was linked to by someone else (can’t recall who). The style of aggregation that Winer describes here is exactly the reason that I like using Bloglines so much. Bloglines just gives you all the content in one shot; click on the feed, and you get all the new items lined up for you. I dont want to have to click my mouse, or the down arrow, to go to each new item, not when I can scan the items myself in a much faster way. I would say that I read about 30% of what comes into my aggregator each day, the other stuff is just skimmed until I know that I’m not interested. Its too slow to work this way when you have an Outlook style aggregator that makes you look at each item individually. The human brain can filter the items much faster and better than any aggregator can, and by using that you can subscribe to a lot more feeds while reading less and making better use of your time.
I do, however, like to have a list of my subscriptions on the side, rather than just getting everything in a true ‘stream’ style. I don’t want the posts from all of my subscriptions mingling together, I lose my context that way. When I click on a subscription with new items, I can prepare myself for the content that I’m going to be getting. forgetfoo.com is going to be giving me different stuff that espn.com which will be different from Adam Bosworth, and it would throw me off to get items from these sources intermixed.
This is the way that I like to read the web each morning, and I really don’t see myself ever using any other style.
