Can anyone recommend an RSS reader, other than Google Reader? Bloglines goes belly up on Oct. 1 and I have about 50 feeds that are about to become homeless. Pls email if you have any suggestions. I could use Firefox but I don't think it has the handy bolding and parenthetical to announce new posts.
According to the mealy mouthed company statement from Bloglines:
The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself.
Rough translation: it's better to get your news from random conversations with friends and strangers you stumble on walking around the streets than to have a list of sources that prioritizes the information. Twitter could tell me when people have updated their blogs (maybe!) but I'd also have to read how someone hurt their elbow this morning. I like twitter for some things but it's impossible to organize it the way a news reader is organized. List of sources, new post notifications, that's all I want.
You become more and more of a crazed, cave-dwelling hermit every day you remain outside the Zuckerberg Continuum and that's what's happening here at tommoody.us. Psychotherapy teaches us that it's possible to erect sanity-saving "boundaries" with friends and loved ones but that logic doesn't extend to the decision to avoid the more toxic social media products out there. The social pressure to join that particular Borg is enormous.