Is RSS part of the solution or part of the problem with regard to Information Overload?

Earlier in the week when I first recognized all the potential uses for RSS, I initially thought it definitely was a great way to combat information overload. The more I read and learned and thought about RSS, however, made me realize there really are two sides to the coin. Like Gabrielle mentioned in her blog, I was dumbfounded upon hearing that Meredith Farkas reads 170 blogs on a regular basis. (And, I believe, she mentioned in the podcast that she knows people who keep track of somewhere around 500!!!) This would be absolutely impossible without RSS. Because RSS makes it so simple to bring all the information people want to keep up with directly to them, people are trying to keep up with more and more. It all appears less overwhelming on the surface, but I think, somehow, it's ultimately going to lead to more overload.

Final Thoughts on Feed

Learning this week about the prevalence of RSS made me think that we actually are closer to the world of Anderson's Feed than I had originally imagined. I see many people in the library where I work (mostly senior citizens) who pride themselves on not having an email account and never having used a computer for anything. I'm sure there will come a time, however, when people will eventually be forced (like Violet's father in the book) "to connect" in order to fully function in society. And, once connected, we all do somehow become dependent on systems like Google in particular and the whole infrastructure of the Internet in general.

What bothers me most about the society in Feed is how the easier access to information oftentimes lessens people's ability (or even desire) to think for themselves. Our education systems are partly to blame with their emphasis on finding the "right" answer (and this is a realm where school librarians can really champion by helping teachers design better units of inquiry...but that's a whole other topic covered in a whole other class!) As in Feed, students can very easily find most of the "answers" to their homework questions (and, sadly, buy complete papers) online these days. While I love providing chat reference in our library and believe that it is an incredible and important service, I oftentimes feel that we "virtual librarians" are part of this "Feed" phenomenon. While I'll refuse to give students answers to their specific homework questions and continually try to redirect them to helpful sources, they will continually ask, again and again, for the "answer". The saddest (and scariest) thing is that, like Titus, many kids actually believe that typing a question and getting an answer online is not cheating, but thinking.

Bloglines vs. Google Reader

Being very new to this whole "feed reader" scene, I tended to see more similarities than differences between Bloglines and Google Reader this past week. Both were very easy to set up and conveniently displayed all of the feeds I had subscribed to. I was disappointed that neither automatically showed the comments of each blog post. (I tried playing around with the different settings to see if this is an option in either service, but couldn't find it. Please, someone, alert me if I'm mistaken in this!)

The differences I did notice are as follows:

• Bloglines has a bit of a "cleaner" interface.
• Google Reader has links to all your other Google services which makes for a more cluttered screen
• Blogger posts appear in one's Google Reader faster than in his or her Bloglines reader. (I just noticed this difference today, Sunday, 9/28, with Steve's latest announcement...it's already showing in Google Reader but has yet to be picked up by Bloglines.)
• Google Reader puts a date/time stamp at the top rt corner of each entry (and does the math for you, letting you know how long ago a post was written) while Bloglines dates each post under the entry. GR's method highlights newer posts.
• Bloglines allows readers either to display all posts from each feed or to show only those posted in the last hour, past 6 hours, past 12 hours, day, 2 or 3 days, week or month. This is convenient if one only wants to see the latest entries.