Software And Tools - Web Tools

When I started out onto Blogosphere and reading the RSS feeds of different people, I was much more well informed then I am today. Lately, I have left my habbit of looking at my RSS aggregator and just rely on the information provided to me by the memetrackers like Memeorandum and the then when I follow the links on the Memeorandum and land on author's blog, I read other posts that he/she might have made along with clicking on any other interesting links. The other source of information for me today is my email, where someone trickers an email with a link and I follow it through.

Now that's no good I think. The idea behind memetrackers was to get a gist of what's happening on the blogosphere. Yes, it is good when we don't have time to read the RSS reader and go through all the feeds (especially when you are subscribed to 100's of them) and still want to be informed about major happenings. But memetrackers in my opinion are reducing the social effect of blogosphere. As not everything that is interesting shows up in Memeorandum and not every interesting author's blog shows up which I would have linked to if I was reading the feeds in RSS aggregator rather then just going to one site. Also, something that interests me might not interest the blogosphere and thus will never show up on memetrackers.

I have to admit that because of memetrackers such as Memeorandum, I have gotten lazy and hardly touched my RSS aggregator in last two months. I am not subscribing to as many more blogs I was before (not that number of subsriptions necessarily means everything). Before I was forced to read the feeds to find out the interesting news, now I know where to turn to get the most interesting news. So as a result of this, I am reading less as well!

Now, don't get me wrong here. Memetrackers is a great idea. It can save us a lot of time but then if people who are interested in reading and learning more, exploring more won't get a chance to read and explore more if they just stick to memetrackers and not get back into habit of reading their subscribed feeds (if they have left that already). I like to see memetrackers as a main page of the newspaper, but there is still lot more interesting in the rest of the newspaper. Most of the times what matters most is all the small and big news that don't show up on the front page of the newspaper. All the magazines and articles what make the part of the newspaper.

Honestly, just as I was typing this post up in OneNote, I thought I will check what's on the front page of the newspaper today (Memeorandum). I went to http://tech.memeorandum.com/ and found one of Scoble's post. And this is what Robert is coming to as well. He said he is unsubscribing from Memeorandum atleast for a week. Well I would not go ahead and unsubscribe ( I will have to fireup my RSS aggregator to unsubscribe ), but I will force myself that I get back onto reading more RSS feeds from now on. That's the best way I found myself to keep me well informed and also made me more wiser each day. So I am going back to my Google News Reader ( I love this reader).

So what all parts of the newspaper are you reading and how good the memetrackers have been for you? For me, I will make a habit of scanning the first page of newspaper but still want to read the rest of the relevant portion of the newspaper.