This may be a sign of my laziness, but I have always felt that one of the primary things one learns in college is the art of skimming, and being able to determine what 20-25% of the assigned reading is the most important to really read. Professors do not expect you to be able to get through all 500+ pages of assigned reading a week, and skimming is a skill one needs throughout life.
We all know information overload — there is so much content coming at us (both online and offline) that it is nearly impossible to keep up.
My surfing patterns have changed dramatically over the past few months. I do not “go to” sites anymore. The growing popularity of RSS and RSS Readers like Netnewswire (Mac) or FeedDemon (Windows) allows me to skim many more sites (currently I subscribe to over 60) than I would ever be able to if I had to go to each site.
on Oct 20th, 2004 at 3:42 am
Bloglines is a good reader too, plus it’s free. RSS is definitely gaining popularity, and for purely content driven sites it’s a good thing.
on Dec 23rd, 2005 at 5:24 pm
Yes the power of RSS. But still the content sent through them is overloaded as the filtering has not been that great and bloggers usually dont take the time to tag their posts correctly. Google news feature has been a little successful for me. But hey the words that you use are by themselves overloaded and you have to give a context for the type of word you are expecting.