NewsBlur: How I Loved to Stop Worrying and Finally Love RSS Feeds

I’ll admit, RSS is far removed from its heyday in the era of Weblogs.com, Blogger blogs with the basic template installed and the venerable Google Reader. When it seemed that everyone had RSS feeds emblazoned on their sites where you couldn’t avoid them, I somehow did.

Today, it seems the little orange radio icon is relegated to the fringes, nooks and crannies of the Internet’s pages, with some sites not even bothering anymore. What a great time to get into newsreaders!

My bookmarks bar is a fucking disaster. Sure, I have links organized in folders by category and such, but I just have so many. I’d spend most of my time clicking on link after link to blog after blog after new site. Then I found NewsBlur. I was immediately addicted. Just go to NewsBlur and scroooooooooollllll. It can even be trained to drop articles with tags you don’t like. Which is cool, but kinda scares me, too.

I took a class a few semesters ago about Technology and Concepts of Identity. It was called Technology and Concepts of Identity. We spoke at length about the trend of “echo chambers” on the internet that are just groups of people that all agree with each other’s opinions and reject and ridicule any other opinions from outsiders. I’ve sometimes thought I’m building my own personal echo chamber with NewsBlur, and maybe that’s why RSS has sort of gone by the wayside. Or, it could just be that web design doesn’t suck so hard anymore. That very well may be the definitive reason. Either way, NewsBlur is a happy medium between the mainline RSS readers of olde and a more intelligent app that can parse websites that may not have a working feed. I like it. Check it out.