Ah, how refreshing!  My news feed was less than 2 pages this time!  I'm able to look at it thoroughly now.  Actually, that's probably only because the volume of news has decreased.

In other words, if the amount of news I could process and react to was a fixed quantity, the only variable in the equation is the total volume of news I filtered.  So, if my measure of "thorough" is only a percentage, then I'm getting better (even thought I'm cheating, sort of).

Well, I'm not actually cheating.  And who's grading me anyway?  I'm just exercising discretion about the use of my time and the use of my informational tools.

So there.

By making this a webservice, content stays in its evironment, never leavng the confines of the corporations firewall.

Is Google thinking this way? [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Interesting.

I still don't know what exactly a blog is for.  It seemed like a great way to journal my thoughts somewhere.  And I love Sam Ruby's concept (is it his?) of Manufactured Serendipity.  I would love to meet some other folks with similar thinking (even if it is a pseudo-accident).

A lot of people blog the news and items they find on the web.  To some extent, that was the initial definition I heard of from Search Engine Watch --"hey, it's a great source for finding new stuff before it's mainstream."  Yet, I'm having a hard time making my news reading (in Radio Userland) a valuable exercise.  I'm sure that I'll eventually stumble across some super-personally-meaningful blogs I want to subscribe to, but Adam Curry talks about his vacation (maybe I'm misquoting, and why do you care anyway?) and Dave Winer talks too much about the World Series (there is plenty of evidence on this one) for my tastes.

Yes, I know that you're allowed to talk about personal stuff on your blog.  After all, it is YOUR BLOG!  But the subscription model is something I haven't quite adapted to.

Don't get me wrong--the whole news posting feature in Radio Userland is great.  It makes a lot of sense and gives me stuff to blog about.  The problem is that much of what I would blog about in the news is simply a mild reaction to mildly interesting news story.  I do want to keep up with the news, but only news I care about.  You can subscribe to a highly focused newsfeed to help with some of that.  But the rest of the time is spent filtering out news items you don't care about.  CNET News.com and Wired News both give me interesting tech tidbits, but I usually don't care about the latest chip approved for the latest standard. 

I'm a software developer for one thing.  That certainly affects the things I want to see.

Maybe I should just chalk all of this up to a good exercise in Radio and limit the actual news reading that I do.  I do want to learn more about RSS and syndication and blogging, but maybe (ironically, for me) Dave Winer's blog and Adam Curry's blog are not the best place to do that.  It's like watching a soap opera for the first time without the advantage of knowing the preceeding story line or any of the characters--"and on today's episode of 'As the RSS World Turns'..."

Does Larry Wall have a blog?  I might like to check it out once in a while.

Conclusion:  I think I am going to stop using Radio for a news reader and focus on blogging things I care about.  I'll just use other sources for blog fodder.  I'll also begin to publish the thoughts I have been working on for so long.  That's the point, right?

Over and out.