Tales of a Technology Omnivore

RSS is the most underutilized web 2.0 tool because there aren’t enough ways to get the feeds to the reader in a convenient fashion. Yes, RSS provides timely relevant personalized news and blog feeds, but you have to be on your RSS reader to read them! …and that’s where the convenience ends. So I stumbled upon this article: “14 ‘OTHER’ Ways to Use RSS Feeds” and it has some very interesting alternate ways to make RSS convenient. You can get your RSSes emailed to you, texted, twittered, printed, widgetized, traditionally formatted (like a newspaper), imed, spoken, and my favorite: filtered by keyword. So let’s say you’re interested in following the Spitzer saga; you use ZapTXT.com to get all news with “Spitzer” in the title to either be sent by text, email, or IM. Try it! Being informed about what we want to know, when we want to know it, how we want to know it… that’s the point of RSS.

That crazy Blackberry. Once you think you have it all figured, it does something RIMmarkable and makes you smile. They’ve released new instant messenger clients for the Blackberry, they’re free, and you can download them to your phone.

They’re nice. The chat appears in the same list as your emails and rises to the top of the list when a new comment is entered. I tried the Google Talk client but I’m probably going to use the Yahoo Messenger since my IM’ing friends are mostly on Windows Live and it’s compatible with YM. Maybe you’re not sure why you should use instant messaging when you can email everyone. Remember, IMs are less formal, more fluid conversations that have overtaken emails as the primary mode of communication for the under 30 crowd. For kids, email is something only old people do.

(more…)