An Article About Whether RSS Can Relieve Information Overload
Ron Miller thinks RSS helps people with information
overload in two main ways. It’s more efficient because
content comes to the person instead of someone going
out looking for it. Aggregators usually have some kind
of mechanism by which someone can organize feeds to
make managing them easier.
What he doesn’t discuss is how people like me who
weren’t reading feeds before are suddenly subscribed
to more sources and have more information coming to
them to manage. Is RSS really helping us or just
giving us more sources and more things to add to the
overload? If I was replacing a print or Web source
with a feed equivalent, I could definitely see how RSS
helps with information overload in that sense. But I’m
not doing that.
Seen when I browsed Scripting News, not via an RSS
feed
(For MC ’cause she’s always asking me about using RSS
to manage information overload.)
(I could have sworn I posted this last night, but it wasn’t on my front page today. Will it still be here tomorrow?)
