5.0 (RSS)

I've liked RSS capabilities for a long time, but I've found that I accrue more feeds than I can possibly read. I think of the habit as a kind of digital hoarding, like collecting Read It Later tags or popping sites into Google Reader, wondering if I'll ever come back to the site I've marked. I let my Diigo groups email me when they're updated, sometimes as a weekly digest, but just like I don't want to try to catalog the whole world, I can't read my whole Twitter timeline any more -- and when I tied my Delicious to FriendFeed I found I started getting more correspondence than I wanted. In the next paragraph I share some thinking on advisors to help with digital overload, and RSS feeds from their blogs.

Richardson (p. 81) describes ways to include RSS feeds in our Weblogs. Blogger has made that easy with its current gadgets. I've added (on the right) three posts each from three bloggers. David Weinberger's written Everything Is Miscellaneous, and Clay Shirky's shared Cognitive Surplus, among other work. The Heath brothers wrote Switch. Among these and others, I think the most urgent for me to read is Howard Rheingold's NetSmart, in which he provides advice on cutting the Internet into a manageable size (like eating an elephant one bite at a time). In describing his most recent work Rheingold says

Instead of confining my exploration to whether or not Google is making us stupid, Facebook is commoditizing our privacy, or Twitter is chopping our attention into microslices (all good questions), I've been asking myself and others how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully. This book is about what I've learned.

So RSS feeds do not equal social media, but I believe similar principles of mindfulness and avoiding overwhelm apply.