Sunday, June 01, 2003

The reason I am testing out Radio it's part of my "research" to see if it suits my (peculiar) needs as a blog reader. I end up using the "News" feature (the aggregator, I guess) as my blog reader. There's a lot to like in Radio: It has boatload of powerful functionality, behind a very elegant user interface. I've tried to conduct an informal, exhaustive visit of blog readers, and Radio is the most recent one in the sequence. It is remarkably easy to start blogging (see?) but it doesn't live up to my fantasy blog reading client. Why? I am an avid blog reader. In fact more and more, I quickly peruse dozens and dozens of blogs. I've almost stopped reading magazines (except Entertainment Weekly :-) and get all my industry and technical updates through the web and primarily by reading blogs and following their links. The best one I've found is NewzReader, and that's the one I use regularly. But in using it I've come to think about a rather different spin on blog reading, one specifically designed for me. Ok, or someone like me. Let me summarize what I am looking for. In a later post I will list somewhat more formal requirements, and then later I will describe what I am doing to meet them. Pito's Ideal Blog Reader: I am focused totally on efficient reading of blogs. Dozens, no hundreds of blogs. I want to spend as little time as possible, and still see what I want to see. I want help not only reading. but locating blogs I don't know about, that I might be interested in. At the same time, I want to remove those that I am not interested in from my focus. This applies to blogs, but it also applies to individual posts. I want to tie into the resources on the web to help me with (1) and (2.) I want to know what other people are reading, I learn about blogs which are like the ones that I like.  I what to discover other resources in the net that I can use to enhance the experience. Oh, and I want a beatiful piece of end user software that is a pleasure to use and stunning to look at. That's all. 10:24:19 PM  >  trackback []   comment []

Ok, this is weird. After spouting off that while I love reading others' blogs I couldn't see how anyone had the time. Now that I installed Radio, I find myself strangely tempted to start writing. While this will be broadly accessible on the web, I don't know how or whether anyone will stumble across it. so I still feel relatively safe. 9:04:08 AM  >  trackback []   comment []