{"id":1223,"date":"2003-08-18T13:38:31","date_gmt":"2003-08-18T17:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/2003\/08\/18\/confessions-of-a-news-addict\/"},"modified":"2003-08-18T13:38:31","modified_gmt":"2003-08-18T17:38:31","slug":"confessions-of-a-news-addict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2003\/08\/18\/confessions-of-a-news-addict\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a News Addict"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n
\n

I confess to being a news addict.  For the past 30 years if I
\n didn’t start the day with coffee and the New York Times, it was like
\n my brain wouldn’t boot up.  When traveling or living abroad I was
\n known to haunt airports’ international terminals, looking to score reasonably
\n recent newspapers off arriving passengers or pilots.  So it was
\n not lightly that I recently cut back my daily subscription to the Times
\n to Sunday only.  The reason was simple – I am in love with my news
\n aggregator.<\/p>\n

I still read the Times everyday, or at least all of the articles that
\n interest me, but I no longer have to wade through the boring stories
\n about zoning legislation on Staten Island or the stylishly sexy adds
\n for wristwatches that cost more than my car.  This is because my
\n news aggregator selects just the stories I am interested in and presents
\n the headline and lead for my perusal, just as soon as they are posted
\n to the Times web site, which is usually many hours before they appear
\n in print.<\/p>\n

What is a news aggregator? Simply put, it is a piece of software that
\n collects and collates whichever of hundred of commercial and private
\n news feeds you tell it to watch. Whenever you decide to check it, you
\n get everything posted recently to the services you are interested, including
\n the New York Times, the BBC, Rolling Stone, Wired, hundreds of topic-specific
\n feeds, and virtually every Blog available in the Cybersphere.<\/p>\n

If you want to check out what a typical News Aggregator looks like,
\n click on the link called "All
\n My News Streams<\/a>" on the right hand margin
\n of my Blog, the Dowbrigade<\/a>.
\n My personal aggregator is built in to Manila, the blogging software in
\n use at the Berkman Cente<\/a>r at Harvard Law School. If it looks cool to
\n you, there are many freeware or shareware standalone aggregators that
\n are easy to
\n download and set up.<\/p>\n

I AM IN LOVE WITH MY AGGREGATOR<\/b>.  It has not only changed the way
\n I keep up with the news, it has changed my life.  It is now the
\n first thing I check on my computer in the morning and the last thing
\n I check before I shut it down. When news breaks, it is usually on the
\n aggregator before it hits CNN or Fox.  I follow the latest postings
\n from Scripting News<\/a> and Slashdot <\/a>as they are posted. I follow obscure
\n and important developments in my field, educational technology.<\/p>\n

Ryan
\n Singel, in Wired<\/a>, writes that the first time he saw a news aggregator
\n he felt a rush he hadn’t experienced since he saw his first web page.  I
\n agree.  I think this technolgy will have a longer and deeper impact
\n on the emerging information society than Blogs themselves, which will
\n eventually settle into a role as one more medium of mass communication,
\n albeit a highly entertaining, individualistic and idiosyncratic one.<\/p>\n

But news aggregators and RSS<\/a>,
\n the technology that makes them work, have the potential to become the
\n Uber-medium through which a wide spectrum
\n of other information formats pass.<\/p>\n

At
\n present, I have but one substantative complaint about my aggregator.  Regardless
\n of whatever else is going on in my life, it keep aggregating.  After
\n two or three hours, each new story is pushed down the page until it
\n disappears into the I-zone, off the radar screen of my cybernetic consciousness.  If
\n I happened to be doing something in my so-called "real life" (such
\n as it is), like earning a living or actually interacting with family
\n members, and can’t get to my aggregator, I lose lord knows how many
\n interesting, perhaps even crucial stories. (Yes, I know I have a tendency
\n to take these things too seriously)  How
\n about a bookmark or cache feature to catch all those features we can’t
\n afford to miss?<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I confess to being a news addict.  For the past 30 years if I didn’t start the day with coffee and the New York Times, it was like my brain wouldn’t boot up.  When traveling or living abroad I was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1444],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-screeds"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}