I’ve been spending some time browsing the vast world of weblogs, expecially those that are available via RSS syndication. The sheer amount and variety of stuff out there is overwhelming – of course not all of it is high quality…but it once again demonstrates both the human drive to communicate (or at least express opinons, which may not be the same thing), and the way simple protocols will be rapidly adopted across the net….just like we saw with the rapid spread of the original html spec…which was about as simple as one could get.
I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite on my Macintosh and Feedreader on my Windows laptop to subscribe and read RSS feeds.
One thing I’d like to see is the ability to subscribe to random RSS feeds in a advertising-free web site, whether run remotely or on my local Apache server. Anyone know of such a thing?
Some blogs I’ve been reading more or less regularly the past couple of weeks (the links are to RSS feeds where available):
- Dan Gillmor (technology news and opinon)
- Tim Bray (technology news and opinion)
- Larry Lessig (technology and intellectual property and politics)
- Mitch Kapor (open source technology from a veteran good thinker)
- CNET news.com (ok, so it’s not really a blog, but they do have good rss feeds)
I’ve been looking for good sources with thoughtful commentary on jazz and roots music, but haven’t found any yet…
For a couple of articles about RSS, see What Is RSS? and What Do I Do With an RSS Feed?.