my 2cents on RSS feeds

RSS has gotten a lot of press... it is one of the new tools that is available for managing and enjoying social media; namely, blogs and news stories. I finally decided to try it out, and this was my experience so far:

The gist: through a 3rd party program (I use Google Reader, which I like), all of your blog updates are delivered to one place to be read by you. It looks and works a lot like an e-mail inbox.

Google Reader:

(Reader photo)

Pros: Saves time checking blogs to see if they’ve updated since the last time you checked. If you read a lot of blogs, you save time navigating from blog to blog. You can check news stories as they come in and stay uber-informed. You don’t have to be on your own computer with your bookmarks to check out the blogs/websites… they are all located on the reader.

Cons: Sometimes (depending on the blog), the photos or the whole post don’t show up on the RSS feed. Considering 85% of the blogs I read is for the photos, this is hugely detrimental for me. If I have to click through to see the good part, RSS is creating an EXTRA step for me, not saving time. You lose some of the experience of reading the post in context, on the web page. This is much more minor, but I kind of like the experience of visiting the web page and seeing the logo and links down the side and such. I might just be weird about this! :-)

I've been using the RSS feeds for about a week now… I’ll probably continue to use it for the pros, but I’m not as impressed as I thought I would be. Have you used it? If so, what do you think?