apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture

Thanks to Sergei for this :
apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture:

"i quit using RSS/syndication readers... i was intrigued by the ongoing hype of RSS - how everything is going to be syndicated and how everyone is going to access data that way...i'm wondering if that's really true beyond the info-nerds."

An interesting read and a different point of view. It's particularly interesting to me as I'm one week away from a trip to Lisbon and a course with a group of ICT coordinators / teachers. As we all have to give a short presentation, I've decided to present bloglines and RSS feeds,etc as something that I have come across recently that I think is very useful / interesting. But I'm not convinced how well it will go down with the group.

The article continues: "Syndication is based on an email model, relatively close to a mailing list model...Like email, updates come in the form of a new item. If you leave your syndication tool alone for too long, those new items build up and you're faced with an INBOX-esque situation, an eternal queue waiting to be checked off."

There are also some very interesting comments on the association that "youth" has been making with email and authority, and why other tools like 'Instant Messenger' and Live Journal are more popular : it's the place where they communicate with their friends, and "There are no checkboxes, no little red numbers that tell you you didn't read everything".

Of the comments posted here, one in particular caught my eye: "I've tried using aggregators before...but the email-ness of it made it into work, and I already have enough work in my life."

I'm sure I'll carry on using an aggregator as I think they are fabulous tools, but I can see why they might not be of interest to some people, and I'm not sure I'd want to introduce them to my students (an exception being if they are university students involved in research, etc.)