Archive - May 30, 2008

Way back when, Boris told me about something called RSS and showed me how I could use it to bring information to me, instead of having to go out and look for it myself. It took a while, but eventually I 'got it' and started amassing RSS feeds from all over the place - starting with my friends' blogs, and then later finding feeds from newspapers, tech blogs, and even Environment Canada (for local weather updates).

I tried different desktop clients as my RSS aggregator (or reader) for a while, but then eventually found out about, and started using exclusively, Google Reader. I love it, and one of the things I like best about it is 'Shared Items' - both being able to share with my friends as well as being able to see what they are sharing. Even better, with some recently introduced features, I can even add a note to items that I share to explain why I'm sharing them. FriendFeed takes this one step further and allows you to have conversations (in the form of comments) back and forth about shared items. I signed up for FriendFeed and have it aggregating some of my stuff (Flickr photos, Google Reader shared items, and Twitter posts) but since nobody else I know is using it - I'm not really making use of it all that much. My FriendFeed feed is here.

Anyways, if you're not using Google Reader yet - I highly recommend it. My shared items page can be found here and there is even an RSS feed for them - although if you've got me listed as a contact in your gmail, then you'll automatically have a feed for my shared items anyways.