Since 5/31 Friday evening--depriving myself of sleep to avoid depriving the family of me during the day (too much anyway) --I have been experimenting with Radio Userland 8.0.8 and especially it's aggregator as a springboard for exploring the Blog world.

My original experience with Radio Userland 7 about a year ago didn't hook me.  Partly, time.  2001 was a tough year, and it's hard to play with things like Radio Userland when you are laying people off, and dealing with shall we say a "rotation of management" around you.  But also significantly because I just couldn't understand it .. I couldnt even understand the morass of Userland sites.   Another problem ... my fingers are wired for emacs and I really didn't think I'd be "comfortable" inside the little submission box of a blog.  I did spin up a blogger account or two, and did half-heartedly dump a few "web travel" links into it last year, but mostly I was back to my *.txt files on my disk.

Lot's happened in the last year for sure.  Now I'm convinced.  About Radio Userland ... and blogs in general.    Reading blogs (& news) through the aggregator is amazing ... time to unsubscribe to various things coming in via email.   I started to wonder how I could more easily subscribe to RSS feeds.  Where were the "yellow pages" and could I add items to my "addressbook"?  Didn't really seem so, but what timing ...  I watched over this weekend as a simple idea on applying "Web mechanism" spread before my eyes across the whole Blog infrastructure community.  On the other hand, it makes me think  it's not such a big or mature blog world after all because 1) well this is a pretty primitive idea not to have been had or taken off before and 2) it certainly did reach the corners of the world quickly, so the real world is bigger by a lot. It feels a little like '92 or '93 w/ the Web.  Something's happening, and ... certainly the blogerati have been shreaking about it for the last year.

Anyway here I am, because this certainly has something to do with Information Flow.