Infovore in a hurry

RSS rocks my world

If you're already getting your full RDA of data from RSS, you probably already know all of this. If you're not, it's time to wake up and smell the 21st century. RSS is a dramatically better way of getting all kinds of information, and has profoundly changed how I find out about the world. Not only does it give me access to all kinds of information that I couldn't realistically obtain otherwise, but it makes me a much more efficient information consumer. At this point, I find the idea of life without RSS pretty unbearable.

Here's why RSS is cool:

• It's ubiquitous. All of the periodic media I consume is available as RSS. I use the same tool to read the New York Times and to read Monk's latest misadventures. For those of you who use LiveJournal, RSS is like LiveJournals's friends page, only it gives you access to the other 95% of the universe as well.
• It's push media. I don't have to check the feeds I'm interested in to see whether they've changed. Some of the feeds I read have a dozen new articles a day, and some don't update for months at a time. With RSS, all of the new articles magically show up in my reader as soon as they're posted.

Here's how it works. Pretty much any online source worth reading these days has an "RSS feed". Typically, the RSS feed is marked with a little orange button, like so: . The RSS feed is simply a web page with a bunch of scary-looking XML code that contains information about recent updates. To read an RSS feed, you'll need a reader. There are many good ones; I happen to like Bloglines because it works well and is web-based. You tell your feed reader which RSS feeds to monitor, and it'll notify you whenever one of them posts something new.

Now that you have your shiny new toy, you'll need something to read. To get you started, here's a partial list of what I read:

Mainstream periodicals

• The Economist. The only newspaper that matters.
• The New York Times. Okay, the NY Times matters a little. The NY Times has over a dozen RSS feeds, broken down by topic.
• The New Scientist. Probably the best general science periodical.
• The Seattle Times. The Seattle Times really doesn't matter at all. They're local, though, so I read their real estate and food feeds.

Random tech stuff

• Accelerating Future. Michael Anissimov's Singularity / Transhumanist blog.
• Adam Bosworth. Very infrequent, always worth reading.
• Bram Cohen. Equally brilliant and insane. Infrequent and fascinating.
• Greg Linden. Lots of good stuff about web tech and personalization.
• Google Talkabout. Local Google team, fairly interesting blog.
• Joel On Software. Excellent developer blog.
• Journal of complexicism. Infrequent but interesting.
• Kurzweil AI. Excellent aggregator of Singulariy-related news.
• Longevity Meme. Somewhat cranky but interesting aggregator of life-extension news.
• Official Google Blog. Google's cool.
• Schneier on security. Outstanding security blog.
• Treonauts. For those of us who take our Treo phones a little too seriously.

Random fun links

• 43 Folders. Getting Things Done fansite.
• Cool Tools. Exactly what it sounds like.
• Damn Interesting. Ditto.
• Digital Photography Review. Probably the best source of digicam info on the web.
• Penny Arcade. Gaming comic strip with absolutely no redeeming social value.
• Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. All kinds of cool stuff, often related to science and/or science history.