Push vs. pull, Data access and overload, or How did I ever survive without feeds?

The internet is not a vast information superhighway. The internet is a worldwide information road network with everything from the Autobahn to backcountry lanes travelled (at best) by the occasional horse-drawn carriage (the difference is that on the net, we don't have the Amish). It's an excellent source for looking up information (thank you, Wikipedia, you unauthorative but incredibly rich repository of knowledge). It's also a great way to be kept up to date on things.

This can, in fact, be a bit of a problem. A lot of my friends, for instance, have blogs. I like to read these whenever they add new posts. LiveJournal allows me to keep track of a lot them using my friends page, of course, but not all my friends have LiveJournals. (Also, I track some journals of people I don't want on my friends list, whether because I don't know them, I don't trust them quite so much, or just because we're not in touch right now and I'd rather they hear personal stuff from me in near-realtime.) And that's not all. I'm a geek. I'm not the most technophiliac in my circle of friends, but I still like to keep on top of some technology news, so I read Slashdot, which has the greatest volume (the quality is uneven, but at least if something interesting happens, I'll hear about it and can investigate at my leisure.) OSNews sometimes has better articles, though. And then I want to be on top of what happens to three or four open source projects.

In order to keep on top of all these things, even with the aid of LiveJournal's friends page, I have to visit dozens of webpages. And how do I make sure to stay on top? I can't waste all day visiting and revisiting dozens of webpages. On the other hand, I want to hear about things quickly—at least the same day, preferably within hours. And if I visit these pages manually, I might forget one or two.

The problem here is that I have to pull all this information. Pulling means that to get some information from Person X, I have to go to Person X and say "Hey, Person X, what's new?" That's not what I want. I want Person X to tell me when something's new. This is where feeds come in. (Well, technically they pull information, but I prefer to think of it (conceptually) as pushed.)

So what are feeds? A feed is basically two things. One, it's a source of information that you can access that contains discrete articles. Two, it's machine readable. This is probably not helpful—some of you know this, some of you remain unenlightened. But what does it mean? It means that I can tell a program to check a feed and have it notify me when there's something new. In fact, I can tell a program to check any number of feeds and spit out all the new articles from all of them. It is in fact very similar to the LJ friends page, except that it's not limited to LiveJournals—all manner of websites have feeds (in one of the related and popular formats RSS and Atom); blogs of all kinds, news sites, technology sites—anything that is in some sense "article based" (as in newspaper articles, or blog posts, or ...) can be syndicated with a feed.

My feed reader of choice is Liferea, the Linux feed reader (wonderful software, if you use Linux and Gnome). In Liferea, I subscribe to 28 feeds (some RSS, some Atom). I "subscribe" to another 20 feeds through my LiveJournal friend list (not all of them are active: A couple of them are abandoned, a few are dummy accounts that my friends have registered to be able to read my protected posts). Even removing a few dead links, that's over 40 pages that I'd have to visit to figure out what's going on.

So far I've talked about how wonderful feeds are in terms of getting information, and they are that. That's one of the two reasons why I'm so happy with Liferea. The other is that I tend to get addicted to this information availability. In the past, it's cost me a lot of time, because I do check all of these resources. Maybe I didn't check them all every day, but I checked a good dozen of them daily—more than daily. Many times daily. If you're like me, and feel a need to have this information input, then a good feed reader can save a lot of time you might otherwise waste on checking (in vain) for updates. Liferea tells me (with a nice little taskbar icon) when there's something new.

So do you want to use feeds now? Sure you do. Let's move on to the questions.

What application should you use to read feeds? Personally, I started out using Mozilla Thunderbird, since I was already using it to read my mail. It's all right, but it's much better at mail than it is at feeds. If you're using Linux with Gnome, I heartily recommend Liferea, which is what I use, though I haven't tried every feed reader out there. If you're using Windows, Omea Reader seems to get some good reviews, but I've never used it. If you're using else ... feel free to make recommendations; I'll edit this section to reflect the opinions of people wiser than myself.

As a footnote: What about LiveJournal? Does it offer feeds? As it happens, it does, and in several formats; both RSS and Atom (I prefer Atom because it offers globally unique IDs, but I know very little about this; arguments in the RSS vs. Atom debate are welcome). What about, in particular, friends locked posts? No sweat: LiveJournal allows you to access even locked posts through either RSS or Atom, as long as your feed reader supports authentication. (Liferea does.) To read my blog without having to navigate to http://petter_haggholm.livejournal.com (particularly helpful for those of you who don't use LiveJournals of your own), just add http://petter_haggholm.livejournal.com/data/atom?auth=digest (or http://petter_haggholm.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest if you prefer RSS) to your favourite feed reader, input your LJ (or OpenID) username and password, and enjoy.