My recent change from web surfing to RSS reading for the bulk of my info-trolling has had some interesting side-effects. One of them has been a “loss of local” because the Vancouver Sun doesn’t have RSS feeds.
Until about a month ago, my way into the web was through tabbed browsing, with a limited set of RSS feeds through Bloglines. I had a number of toolbar bookmarks organized into more than half-a-dozen categories, some of them with more than 30 sites. Apple’s Safari browser handled them well, but when I switched to Firefox, it didn’t. With any more than a dozen open tabs, the surfing would slow to a crawl.
So I switched most of the feeds over to Bloglines, going from 28 feeds to 230+, and leaving only those with no RSS feeds in the toolbar bookmark lists. That made them manageable.
But going to RSS turned out to be a bigger change than I thought it would be. In the old days, I hit my bookmarked websites two or three times a day, and checked Bloglines once, or maybe twice. Now I have Bloglines open all the time, and every 10 minutes or so, it fills itself up with new news and blog posts. I’m awash in a flow of interesting information, and rarely get to my old-style tabbed browsing, where the Vancouver Sun lives.
I still get local news, of course, through the media that does have RSS feeds — such as CBC — and through a half-dozen local blogs that point me not only to the big things that are happening, but also the smaller stories that escape the notice of the big newspapers.
But when it comes to the Sun, I stopped reading the print edition some time ago and now, because of that lack of an RSS feed, it has become a very minor part of my infoscape. You can argue that’s my loss, I guess, but it’s their’s, too.
TAGS: NEWS, VANCOUVER, RSS, BLOGLINES
