Still, I can already echo what Zephoria’s saying: I’m losing my grounding because I have so much content coming in, and it’s too easy to fragment. Maybe I just don’t know what I’m interested in yet, so I’m overwhelmed by all the things I *could* be interested in.

Cheers!

J.P. – I’m interested in your concept for multiple tiers of content. It scares me a little, because if I were operating in that type of homogenous composition environment, I would find it much easier to misclassify something and have it exposed to the wrong audience. I like the idea of having a completely different composition environment depending on my audience. It makes it easier to remember who I’m writing for.

Chris, that link is quite interesting. I think the author very accurately points out some of the limitations of RSS, things which I have struggled with, and feel that I’m finally starting to get a handle on. For me, it’s a combination of the tools that I use (I’ve switched entirely to FeedDemon and a PocketPC aggregator called NewsUpdate), and my attitude about my feeds. While it is seductive to try to “stay on top” of my feeds, and constantly mark them all off as read, I have to remind myself that is not necessary, and in fact part of the value I get from my feeds is that I always have content with me on the go (on my PocketPC) when I find myself in those short snippets of time where it is impossible to do anything particularly productive. Okay, I’m rambling…

My last point is that I believe the author of that article you linked to is missing one important point, which is that youth and adults have very different priorities, which necessarily dictate that they spend their attention on very different things. I think it’s naïve to think that youth will eschew email in the corporate world – it’s just not possible. I believe I’m part of the first generation that grew up on IM, and while I still use it daily for work and for play, it can’t possibly replace the stateless aspect of email – that is, that I can “send and forget” with email. IM requires that there be someone on the other end of the line.

Great comments!

On another note (as we’ve talked about before), even the makers of Flickr (at a Vancouver PHPUG meeting) decried the difficulty of creating private RSS feeds. There are definitely uses for secured RSS feeds.

I think what you suggest here is a great idea btw. I would add that

As an example (and sort of follow up to my last comment), I know that there is a wide audience to my blog. I know that my coworkers, friends, imediate familay, and relatives all follow my blog. That is quite an audience (which lead me to my content access system that I wrote), and while 95% of the content that I write I have no cares in the world about who reads, every now and then, I write an article which is only targeted towards friends and family or just friends and not family, and keeping it that way is important to me.

As I mentioned, since RSS does not support any identification methods other than username and password (which are not secure enough), none of this maters yet….but maybe some day.

J.P.