So I’ve tried the whole subscribing to RSS thing. It sucks. It sucks moose cock.

I’m rarely at the same computer over and over again (I have one at work, one at home, and one I use to work from home, etc.) and, to be honest, the whole idea of being tied down to one computer is too old fashioned for me. I prefer to have everything that’s possible online and waiting for me once I “plug in.” So running four different RSS readers on four different machines is a total waste of time and too difficult of a task to maintain. And what’s more, what happens if I’m travelling and log in from a foreign computer, or an Internet cafe?

My life is in My Yahoo! I prefer it that way. Even though online identity and preference retrieval is years behind where it should be, it’s by far the “best practice.” As Identity on the Internet matures, you’ll see that you no longer need any software on your computer or access device at all other than some means to get online and some method to view and work with applications and documents once you get there.

As I type this on the third computer I’ve used today, I have an inkling to read some weblogs. Usually, I just go to my home page and click the “People” links. That is, after all, the original intent of a “home page”—to have a site on the web where people can find out about you and where you maintain your starting points for web surfing. You are NOT supposed to have a home page without external links as that would “break” the web. So I either use the “People” links on this page, or I just type in URLs of ‘blogs that I like to read. But in this scenario, I miss out on some of the best features of today’s weblog software programs—“syndication.” I have no way to know which weblogs have been updated. I have no way of knowing how to find new weblogs, and I have no other recourse but to go to them all. So even though I have maybe 30 or 40 listed on my homepage, there are about 30 to 40 more I read occasionally that I only find by surfing other peoples’ sites or from memory. That, too, is unmanageable.

So even though a hundred people are working on a hundred different RSS readers, I won’t be using them. I’ve tried several, they all were nice for various reasons, and sucked for others, but none of them had what I would call a “killer app” status. What needs to happen is an online “portal generator” that allows you to point a site to as many RSS feeds as you’d like and generate a list of updates and an efficient way to sift through them. Additionally, it would be nice to have “what’s related” and “what’s near me” type of functionality, as well as maybe even some reviews of a sites contents.

Sure, tools exist that would allow me to create my own application on my own web site, but that’s time consuming and not really geared towards the mass market by any stretch. I could use RSS Monkey or something like that, and write some quick PHP. But can you see my mother doing that?

Bookmarks have been unmanageable since the start and, with RSS in play, aren’t even a viable option anyway.

I have a feeling that if anyone’s going to pull it off, it’s going to be Google and the Blogger people. I have only a dim idea of what the Lafayette Project is all about, but it seems to have something to do with getting new weblogs to read from “trusted” sources, and Six Apart moving into the hosting space, while probably good as a revenue generator, is not really where I’d like to see them heading (which is developing Blogger Pro and furthering the very notion of where weblogs can go).

So even though I think Google will take this section of the game by storm, I’m hoping for one that ties into my.yahoo.com, where I already keep my life.