The Zen of RSS/Blogs

I may, slowly, be beginning to understand the point of blogging and RSS as a pair. You'll have to bear with me if you've been into blogging from the beginning; I have to say that I personally was taken completely by surprise by the blogging craze and have had to work pretty hard to come up with something to post to this essentially unread blog every week or so.

Now, however, I'm starting to see it. The beauty of a blog post, as contrasted to e-mail or usenet (does anyone even remember usenet?) is that the author has to post with no real expectation of getting any responses. And the author is expected to post regularly; it seems that the real bloggers write multiple posts every day. Out of this mishmash arise a few blogs that are truly noteworthy; those end up in the RSS readers of the users ... it's a kind of double quality control. First of all the poster has to try to write something worthwhile or nobody will ever read it. Secondly, the RSS feeds that are good will eventuall show up where like minded people can find them, enabling a kind of monkey-see, monkey-do approach to quality control.

The feed reader interfaces are pretty good too. Not much challenge to guess which one I'm using, but there is plenty of choice and I'm sure everyone can find a favourite. So if, over time, I can fill my RSS reader with things I actually want to read, I will be left with the problem of finding time to read it...