Talking about RSS, I just find it one of the best innovation in IT since, well, the invention of internet…
Seriously, when you love news and reading newspapers or weblogs, you definitely don’t want to spend hours just looking on 50 different sites to see if there are new updates, and I think using an rss aggregator (as newsfire for example if you use mac). You gain so much time in reading news and blogs and you can now almost in real-time when your favorite website has been updated.
I found lame (LAMEEEEEE!!!) that nowadays many news website do not use RSS. It’s a shame, because many newspapers I’d like to read more often, I just read once a month because the site has no rss feed. These website lose so much potential readers just because they lack such a simple and basic feature! For example, the swiss newspapers 24 heures and le matin, or the magazines l’illustré or l’hebdo. Even though they are maybe not the preffered source of information for L’académie francaise, they are certainly the most read newspaper from the french part of switzerland, but gosh in 2006, they still don’t have rss! Unbelievable! They should show the right example less technologically advanced countries should follow, and not the contrary! For example, I read daily 2 romanian newspapers gandul and adevarul, and both have been using rss for a while! Of course, le temps and neue zürcher zeitung (in my opinion on of the best european news paper, though it’s in german), two swiss newspapers that I estimate particularly, also use rss (at least).
However, another thing that I disregard, is that most newspaper’s rss feed contain only one line summary, and often cut it in the middle of a sentance, I hate that! It means that if you want to read the full article, you have to go on the website, and so they get more money through adsense. It’s no good for me. The good thing behind rss is that you can only extract the relevant (and complete, please) content of an article without having to visit the website, unless you need to access specific information. And pictures of course. However, some vicios people use rss as another publicity propaganda method. If people want to use adsense on their website, fine, but I want to allow information without if I want (unless it’s the only way to keep the access to information free). Look at most blogs, you can access complete posts with pics from your rss client. And I love it!
Seriously, I’m a fan of liberty of freedom (never wondered why there’s a link to the excellent reporters sans frontières on the sidebar?) ! I really would love a world where everybody has the right to access facts, rather than opinion or biased information. But most people cannot tell the difference… And worse, they don’t even care whether there is one!
I just read in an interesting report by pewinternet (fint it here) today that over 30% of bloggers consider themselves as journalists. Gosh! Right! Having worked as journalist, I can tell the difference between “journalism” and just “writing”, but obviously many people don’t!
Hahaha, and US medias pretend to do journalism! Of course, dear! How would you call, if not journalism, the emphasis that for example cnn puts on some killed israelis, while hundreds of lebanese victims are slightly forgotten?
Mouhahahahaha!!! Impartiality? My …! Information!