My recent rewiring of Tribblescape to use Movable Type has introduced me to all kinds of fun technology. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered enough ways to waste time online to keep me unproductive well into the next decade.
I’ve been trying to find a good way to keep my Web browsing time to a minimum, but still satisfy my information addiction. Aside from using blogrolling.com (which I discovered yesterday) to keep track of when favorite blogs have been updated, I’ve been reading up on RSS syndication and news aggregators. I’ve got a bunch of them lined up to try now:
I feel like I’ve been living in a cave, or maybe just the early 90s. Combined with some of the reading I’ve been doing lately (Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and GURPS Transhuman Space), this kind of automated information-gathering technology seems essential to the advancement of humankind’s potential. All we need now are pocket AIs and augmented reality implants.
Update: Aggregators are definitely not a mature technology yet; most of the programs listed above (at least the free ones) are somewhat shaky in the user interface department. The idea has promise, though. For the time being, my favorite is AmphetaDesk, which does a decent job of grabbing my daily news for me. I’ve put a link to AmphetaDesk in my Windows Startup folder, and from there, it’s set up to refresh from my favorite sites every three hours. It’s not perfect — my biggest complaint is trying to navigate through the single HTML page it generates for all of the sites it scrapes — but it’s more convenient than manually clicking through a pageful of links, which was my old aggregation method.
