Really Simple Syndication

I broke out my RSS reader last night while sitting on the couch with my partner. I’ve been using Newsblur for tracking blogs ever since Google Reader shut down, and part of me still holds a grudge against Google for deciding that RSS was an archaic bit of technology they no longer wanted to support. I value my RSS reader to the tune of a yearly subscription, even during the lean years where it felt like an extravagance.

My partner had never encountered an RSS reader before. The difference in our age is a handful of years, but within those years was the advent of social blogging platforms such as Livejournal and the eventual rise of social media. Things powered by RSS without anywhere near the level of control if you value the ability to curate and sort the flows of information into meaningful categories.

Occasionally I read about the death of the blog. It’s all about social media these days, or establishing an email newsletter and communicating directly. Yet when I leave my RSS reader untouched for a week, I come back to over 1,000 entries that have built up in my absence.

Blogs are still out there, generating content. They may place more importance on getting shared on Facebook or Twitter these days, but you can still tap their feed directly and get everything published sent your way. It’s not as obvious as it used to be, back in the days when the RSS symbol could be found on every website, but on the rare occasions that my reader can’t find a feed on its own I can usually track one down by typing the web address and adding /feed to the end.

So I sit here, feeling like a throwback, processing a thousand blog entries worth of information in the space of an hour. Tagging the ones I need to come back to because they hold an interesting idea, letting the others disappear into the endless stream of the feed.