Blog vs. Surf 

I've really gotten into blogging lately. Not just maintaining a blog mind you, but also reading blogs. For that purpose I use RSS Bandit, which is a slick program written using .NET for downloading and managing Blogs that use either RSS or Atom XML news feed formats. Of course, RSS is also used by websites to let you know of changes to their site, and for software vendors to alert you to announcements about their products. This is great... because now I don't have to subscribe to yet another email list where they can sell my address. I can track changes to things on my terms, safely and spam free. So I track a lot of RSS feeds, especially for MSDN so I can be alerted to new articles, and for Sourceforge projects so I can see when a new version is available of something. More importantly, I can see an article summary right in RSS Bandit and decide whether its even worth my time to read it. This makes my internet usage much more efficient and directed.

So what's the downside? Lately I've missed surfing the web. I do so much directed reading thanks to RSS feeds, that I don't really just open up Internet Explorer, go to a site, and lazily look around... seeing what's there. Most of the sites I did that for now have RSS feeds, so I already know whats new and available. So if I have some free time, and RSS Bandit says that nothing is new... I don't know where to go. I remember years ago, Yahoo used to have a random site feature, where you could click on a prominent link on their site, and it would take you to a random site in their database. These days that would be pretty risky to do from work though, seeing as how more than half the sites are still porn.

I guess from now on when I get bored, and want to surf, and see that nothing is new, I'll just have to sit down and write another blog post like I'm doing now, so other people will have something new to read. Carry On.