the hungry thing

"feed me"

i've now subscribed to approximately 40 feeds, including a few pubsubs, and the number is growing steadily - needless to say, i'm an rss/atom addict.

a few years ago when i first heard about this technology, i gave a typical response: "so what?" at the time of course, i had no idea what this whole blogging phenomenon was all about and i was happy hitting news.com and slashdot daily through my browser to catch up on tech news. going around hitting a few pages each day isn't too bad, but when you start to explore the blogosphere and want to keep up on tens if not hundreds or thousands of blogs, you really start to appreciate feeds.

then, i discovered pubsub - this service is pure joy to a tech maven. if you need to know the buzz about anything on the blogosphere, this is the tool to use. in a nutshell, you choose a search term and pubsub will aggregate all posts containing that term to a convenient feed you can subscribe to. truly a market researcher's dream come true.

unfortunately, as scoble points out, many are still clueless as to the real power behind these technologies. if you're trying to grok this stuff and would like some help, feel free to e-mail me; i'll try to point you in the right direction!

on a related note, i was happily using bloglines until i realized that it doesn't refresh my feeds as frequently as i'd like. thus, i was in search of a new aggregator and i found onfolio. so far, onfolio has proven itself to be an awesome tool. since it's a client-side tool, i can refresh my feeds as often as i like and it will also work offline. it's got a great "deskbar" interface which gives me a little standalone RSS control center and it links into my browsers as well. i currently only have one workstation, but i wonder if it synchronizes my subscriptions between clients too - that would be hot.

i've also become aware of the fact that i need to set up a link blog. it's been added to my long to do list.

p.s. the title of this post is a reference to this book :)