Sunday, July 4, 2004

Relief for the over aggregated? UPDATE: Going on July hiatus (see below) Experimenting with a variety of RSS news aggregators for a few months led me to one inescapable conclusion: There's an awful lot of information out there. The alert notifier for the online aggregator http://bloglines.com has become the major scold in my life, telling me that close to 100,000 "new items" are always waiting for my attention. Yikes! And I keep discovering more feeds to look at. Well, that's what I get for subscribing to so many while testing those aggregators for PC World. Now that my aggregator project is over, it's time to unsubscribe from a lot of those feeds. I'm fighting the temptation to explore not only the latest updates to the aggregators, but to look at RSS from the other side with Dan Bricklin's new RSS generator, ListGarden, a promising tool accompanied by excellent documents about planning and writing online content. On Hiatus However, instead of exploring even more tempting info and software, I'm going to do my best to cut down your information overload -- by sending this weblog on vacation for the rest of July... while I get busy packing and looking for new quarters in Knoxville, Tenn. Speaking of which, the other kind of Tennessee quarters are very attractive (so is the state flag, so I played with the two images a little, part procrastination and part meditation)... As a long-time fan of fiddle, guitar, mandolin and banjo tunes, I do like the state coin's "Musical Heritage" theme, and the culture it represents. While updating my home page last week, I noticed that one of the oldest stories I have online stretched all the way to Tennessee to set the stage for a New England Fiddle Contest. That coincidence couldn't be an omen or anything, could it? Time to tune in WDVX on the Web, bookmark SouthKnoxBubba, KnoxNews and the MetroPulse and go watch the fireworks over the Charles River... then wait for the mail to bring the faculty letter of appointment I've been told to expect from the University of Tennessee School of Journalism & Electronic Media. July 7 editing & update: Unlike a lot of checks, that letter was in the mail! 3:57:51 PM    comment []

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