Since I’ve finished writing exams yesterday, I now have today free to relax, regain my sanity, and enjoy life once again. I thought I would enjoy this moment by spending some time engaged in some good, old fashion, personal reflection through blogging at Seattle Coffee House. So here I am, sitting at a booth listening to lounge Christmas Carols, to which the workers have memorized. Anyway, I thought I’d spend today talking about some of the newest and coolest stuff out there.
Lately I’ve been playing with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. Frequently you’ll notice while surfing the web that a lot of sites, particularly news websites, will have either the letters RSS on it, or this nifty 
. RSS is basically a simple method of sharing information. It has many uses, but its most popular is with feed readers, a programme that will gather content from RSS feeds and put them into one nice place. It’s like receiving an email from your favourite websites every time one gets updated, or new content is added–and there’s no spam, you subscribe to the feeds you like. It’s better than the old way of keeping bookmarks to your favourite sites and checking them frequently to see if something new was added.
RSS feeds are easy to use. Grab a client, such as FeedReader, there are probably better clients out there, but I use Newsfire for OS X, which is very nice. Then you’ll will want to go to your favourite sites and subscribe to their RSS feeds. Usually just entering the URL of the site will work. I recommend http://cbc.ca/rss/ for Canadian news, and there is also BBC news which is good for international news. I’ve realized by reading BBC news just how much North American news is about us, even our international news. Most blogs have RSS feeds too, except for mindsay sadly. 
Of course, you’ll want to subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog.
I’ve been thinking about where things have been going in terms of online culture. It is interesting how this whole thing is starting to turn our worlds upside down. It used to be all about big news companies, but the internet provides a really inexpensive way for anyone to express themselves. Of course the big guys are still very big, but technologies are making it easy for individuals to network and share their ideas–it’s like anyone can create their own news empire. During the last US election, the influence bloggers were having was not because of any individual blogger, but rather their influence was through a ripple effect, one blogger makes a comment about some issue, then many others add their own two cents, and sooner or later everyone’s talking about it. Then later CBS news will pick up on the story.
The internet does a lot of strange things that we don’t often think about. I remember reading in one of my telecom books of a story about how a lower class citizen in a third world country was able to do business with first class citizens through the Internet, something that otherwise would have been impossible because of the class system that exists in that society.
It’s also interesting what we are starting to do with search technologies. Programmers have built programs that solve crossword puzzles by running clues through a search engine. Search is powerful when you have the data and the right algorithm. I can imagine that if someone built a search engine for blogs we could make interesting observations about humans and society. I think it would be better than polling during an election. I remember how my history professor always said that only 5% of people matter in history, the other 95% don’t. So it’s rare to find a lot of information on ordinary folk who were kings or lords. But if we can keep all this blog data somewhere, it would make a good historical record.
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