Quote of the day II

You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day? That's how I began to feel about my reader. RSS readers encourage you to oversubscribe to news. Every time you encounter an interesting new blog post, you've got an incentive to sign up to all the posts from that blog—after all, you don't want to miss anything. Eventually you find yourself subscribed to hundreds of blogs, many of which, you later notice, are completely useless. It's like having an inbox stuffed with e-mail from overactive listservs you no longer care to read.

A year or so ago, I dumped RSS and began to look for a new way of reading stuff online. Eventually I found a system that works much better for me: bookmarks, browser tabs, and the middle mouse button. My technique allows me to scour the Web for great stuff far more efficiently—and with less guilt and more fun—than I could from the dull outpost of my RSS reader.

-Salon's Farhad Manjoo grew tired of his RSS feed and developed his own system.

A few months back I did something similar to what Manjoo describes in his piece. As a voracious consumer of online content, I often found myself daunted and a bit overwhelmed by my RSS feed after I'd been away from it for a few hours, and reading blogs posts through Google reader just didn't have the same feel. Something felt missing about it, and I guess it was at that point that I came to fully realize that there's something to be said for the atmospheric element of reading a blog post on the actual site it's posted on. It's kind of like drinking bourbon in your living room as opposed to a country bar with a pool table and a juke box. Sure, it's the same bourbon from the same bottle from the same distillery in Kentucky, but the bourbon just seems to taste better in the country bar with the pool table and the rad juke box than it does in the living room, doesn't it? You feel me?

So anyway, yeah, I use tabs and bookmarks more often now, though I do still read my RSS on my Blackberry from time to time.