monotone: does rss feed the soul?

I love google reader and rss, its enabler. I love how they let me collect sources of news, opinion, random gossip and the like. reader lines them up and lets me pretend to be focused about my internet consumption. don’t have a clue what I’m talking about? you need to read my post on setting up an rss (aka feed) reader.

but what is the aesthetic cost of this drive for efficiency?

I just see headlines. you know that three second rule about how much time a website has to grab the visitor’s attention? divide that by a hundred. sometimes I’m so “focused” I don’t even read all the words in the headline.

here’s my reader view. how did I make it look so cool? helvetireader and a smidge of colorful list view. but I digress.

I can see all of barista‘s and the lone wolf ‘s funny, funny posts. (their tweets are funny, too. follow them!) I can click on a headline that grabs my uber-focused meta-tention:

so that’s nice. and convenient. but what am I missing?

now I see it the way the creators want me to. I can see how creative they are with the site and cool features that don’t translate to the monotone of rss.

in conclusion: do your news via rss. do blogs that way, too. but with the stuff that’s more personal, don’t forget to sneak a peek at the source once in a while. you may be surprised by sudden beauty.

what oases have you found in the new content-focused web?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Forget Curating Your Own Google Reader (shankrila.com)
• Ten Steps To Build A Basic Content Hub (via Scalable Intimacy) (smbar.posterous.com)
• RSS: the biggest time-saver on the web (jonworth.eu)