Kill Your RSS Reader

This article by Slate magazine's tech guy, Farhad Manjoo, is all about how RSS readers, championed by many as the only way to stay up-to-date on all your fave blogs and sites, are really unnecessary, not to mention annoying. I loved reading it. I have designed two RSS pages, on Yahoo! and on Google, over the past couple years, but I've never become a dedicated user of them. At best, I ignore them; at worst, they give me an unpleasant feeling of slackery and laziness, making something that should be fun - finding cool info on the web - as much of a chore as checking my work email (well, back when I had a job).

Manjoo's strategy for keeping up with the Joneses is a more sophisticated version of what I already do: he organizes the bookmarks in his browser according to how often he visits a site, and then opens them all up in the same window using the middle mouse button. (If you don't know what happens when you click on a link with the middle mouse button, go try it. I'll wait.)

My problem with RSS readers has always been: I already know what sites I want to visit. I already know what sites I'm going to visit. If a site has useful and interesting information, I'm unlikely to forget about it, so why do I need an RSS reader nagging me to do it? Until now I've been relying more on Delicious and my browser history to get me where I want to go, but I'm going to try this bookmark strategy. Let's see how it works.