The Merits of Site Feeds

About Tyler Cowen’s rant against RSS —a technology that brings all of the blog posts in one place, called a “feed reader”.

#1. Try it. Don’t listen to me or Tyler Cowen. Go to Google Reader (the best “feed reader”), and add to it the feed URLs of all the blogs you like. (Here’s the feed for Midas Oracle. And if you want to subscribe to Midas Oracle via Google Reader in one click, here’s the link.

#2. Once you have added all the blogs you like, what is great is that the only place you have to visit now is Google Reader —as opposed to clicking like crazy to visit all the blogs you need to visit. Make sure that your browser (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, or else) remembers your Google Account user name and password. Go to your “feed reader” once a day, twice a day, or just once a week. It’s your call. Google Reader (just like any other Web-based feed reader) remembers old items, so feel free to put your needs at the center, and this RSS technology at the periphery.

#3. When you feel it’s the right time to read your favorite blogs, go to your Google Reader, click on ALL ITEMS. Activate the sub-window by selecting a portion of text in the first blog post you spot —it’s necessary to perform the next operation. Then, put your finger on the GO DOWN button of your keyboard. Scan the title of that blog post and its body text. If it is of no interest to you, then push the GO DOWN button, and you’ll get to the next blog post. (Actually, if the blog posts are short, they can be grouped by pack of three or four, on your screen.) That way, you can subscribe to many blogs, but still be very selective about what you read.

#4. If you are a blog publisher, note that it is a great idea to put your main idea in bold. It helps the scanning —and that’s also true regarding the behavior or normal, website-based readers.

#5. The day you want to leave your current Web-based feed reader, just export your OPML file, and import it into another (Web-based or PC-based) feed reader of your choosing. (My OPML file is here. The list of all the blogs I like is here —especially this one.)

Happy feed reading!!

And, generally speaking, don’t pay too much attention to what Tyler Cowen says on information technology and the Internet. He is a good economist and a curious blogger (I mean, a blogger whose level of curiosity is high), but you will never hear anything on open-source software, or social bookmarking services, or any other revolutionary technology, on Marginal Revolution —alas.