SwiftVets.com

[Me#1You#10]

With the campaign and holiday period behind me, I've decided to put my big toe into the RSS News Aggregation waters to learn something about (what appears to be) a rapidly-growing information dissemination internet technology.

After a bit of research (and I DO mean just a teensy bit), I elected to try out "Sharpreader" , one of what appears to be several dozen offerings currently vying for their place in the information delivery business. Not least among the alluring features of Sharpreader was it's pricetag...that's spelled FREE my friends .

Download and install were painless although program activation elicits a momentary black screen (almost as though you're either loading a DOS program from CMD prompt or your video card is doing a resolution change...which doesn't happen BTW) which makes me both nervous and curious. Also, upon initial loading, my firewall (ZA Free) advised me that the program had tried to initiate "server" rights (which I initially authorized but have subsequently denied with no apparent adverse affects thus far.)

Now for the FUN part...setting up and organizing the newsfeeds.

As I stated earlier, this information delivery medium is still early in it's evolution, not so much because the technology is new (I've been seeing references to RSS for some 3-4 years now as best I can recall) but because the information providers have (as I see it with my ONE whole day of playing with this) not yet elected to come onboard enmasse. While the NYT and the WaPo have well developed indexes of XML offerings, many other news entities do not (although I certainly might be overlooking them). However, what really surprised me is the seeming lack of universal application in the blogosphere...yup, the cutting edge pajamahadeen is kind of hit and miss with this tech (a MAJOR use of this medium in MY little world). For example, both Instapundit and Captain Ed provide the feature...not so Hugh Hewitt and Andrew Sullivan.

At any rate, it's an intriguing bit of technology and my fellow news junkies on the forum might enjoy giving it a try. Sure can save a LOT of mouse-clicking looking for the latest anti-Kerry screed with which to delight your fellow forum members