Phil Oye

To continue a trend of talking about ancient applications as if they were new…

I installed NetNewsWire a while ago, liked it, but stopped using it for some reason. On a whim, I thought I’d give it another spin and I have to say I don’t know how I lived without it.

For those that don’t know, NetNewsWire uses RSS which Mark Pilgrim, in his article, What is RSS? describes as:

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs.

What this means is that you can subscribe to just about any weblog or news site and in your newsreader you get a subject line and excerpt of articles on the Web. You can then click on the items of interest to go the site to finish the article.

What is really great about this is that it behaves like a UseNet newsreader or a mail client. You are notified of updates to sites and it keeps track of what you’ve already read. I’ve found that I’ve been following 40-50 sites on a somewhat regular basis and much of that time is wasted on going to a site that hasn’t been updated or scanning something that I’m not interested in. This is a great timesaver.

The question is whether I will end up monitoring more sites in the same amount of time or the same number of sites in half the time. This is much the same question that arises with TiVo. You either watch more/better TV or you watch less, but better TV. Either way, you get better content. The same with RSS.