Sunday, November 18, 2007

RSS Feeds Are For Geeks

I noticed something completely random today: the RSS feeds I subscribe to (through Bloglines) with the most subscribers are mostly websites that are kind of geeky (ok, really geeky). The "Top 10" feeds I subscribe to, in terms of subscribers, are:
Site # Subscribers
Slashdot 103,507
Dilbert 90,229
BBC News 86,447
Engadget 74,694
Boing Boing 62,900
CNET News 42,454
Techdirt 40,943
Wired Top Stories 26,613
Lifehacker 19,834
ESPN.com 16,730

Of those, one may argue that the BBC news feed isn't "just for dorks," and neither is the ESPN.com feed, though the rest really do seem to have the geek appeal. The only other feed I subscribe to with greater than 10,000 subscribers is kottke.org.

I assume that this is because it's the geeks who really use RSS feeds to begin with. Most of the "general public" using the internet are probably going to only a few sites: news sites, YouTube, and email sites. It's us dorks, more interested in rapid information access, who find the benefit of RSS feeds, so it's natural that sites that cater to dorks (or geeky interests) are more popular in the feedreaders. I wonder what other readers, such as the Google Reader (which I am not a fan of), show.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Ah, The Joys...

One of these days I might become good at regularly updating a blog (or anything else for that matter, other than work). I have all these good intentions when the day starts, but by the end of the day, and with the lure of a stack of unfinished video games, a few unfinished stitching projects (not to mention those that I want to start, but I'm trying to finish up the open ones before I do...), and books to read, I find that when I get home from the gym, I don't really want to write more on the computer.

I have, however, had a thought recently, and I may post it here and see how it goes. I was listening to an episode of TWiT (This Week in Tech, a fabulous podcast hosted by Leo Laporte) recently, and Leo made a comment to John C. Dvorak ("dvorak dot org slash blog") about how because they all work in an audio (and video) format, and things aren't written down, it's easy to forget what you've said. Alas! I'm going to try to do transcripts of each show. I hope to have them up by 1 week after they were originally posted to the iTunes feed, and I'll be adding my commentary to what they've said. We'll see how long I can keep it up, anyway. Or if it ever gets noticed.

I'm going to try to post here more regularly...with goings on at the gym, stitching, video games, well, really, whatever.

In the meantime, if you need/want some interesting reading, check these out:
Wincing at Light (a blog recently started by a fellow FOFC'er who is using it to share his writing with the world--he's writing a novel and posting chapters up, along with other random musings)
Sword and Laser, a social network/forum/thing I first heard about on TWiT. It's basically an online sci-fi and fantasy book club. They're currently reading Pullman's "Golden Compass," which I read last year, and on the 19th they'll be starting "Ender's Game." I'm using my common moniker, "terpkristin," over there.