23 Things Assignment #3: RSS

The RSS feeds I subscribed to other than Library Journal were chromewaves.net, Pitchfork, New York Times Books and Publishers Weekly - Best Sellers. Here are my comments in no particular order:

• Two of my feeds (Pitchfork and Publishers Weekly) stopped working. I added these directly through Bloglines, but they only worked for the day. The only way to get them to work was by finding the RSS feed from their website and adding the feed that way.
• This is the second time I have used RSS feeds (I believe the last time was with Google Reader) and my experience wasn't any better than the first. Yes, it is a nice way to compile everything together and eliminates the need to endlessly check different blogs, but it feels wrong. I'm a creature of habit and like the comforting look of my favourite blogs. To me, it is akin to the book/e-reader debate: there is just something about the real thing.
• I find readers also eliminate a lot of the functionality of blogs. For instance, chromewaves.net has a built in audio player that opens in the webpage while keeping the content visible. But in bloglines, it opens an external media player. Want to find out the tags for a post? Got to click on the post and go to the original webpage. Blogs are also becoming part of larger websites (or websites are forming blogs) with increasing frequency - take our TPL blogs, for instance. Only reading the blog through Bloglines will either create extra work to find the other content on the website.
  
• In my experiences, readers do not have photos, which I detest. (If I remember correctly, Google Reader may have had photos, but it looked horrid). Functionality is fine, but aesthetics also account for a lot.
  
• Would I use an RSS reader? Maybe for the websites I check periodically and would prefer to browse the headlines. But, for now, I don't prefer it over those websites that I check daily/hourly.