Rodent Regatta

Since January of 2002, I’ve been playing with weblogs and weblogging. My first experience was with a product called Radio Userland. For anyone interested in getting started with a weblog and learning how to experiment, I’d heartily recommend Radio.

One feature that will ”hook” you immediately is the ability to subscribe to updates or news feeds from other web sources. They may be weblogs. They may be news sites. Really, it could be any site that has chosen to provide an RSS feed. J.D. Lasica has written an article that explains how this works.

What JD’s article makes abundantly clear is how many professions could be enriched by using weblogs with RSS feeds to keep people informed and to encourage greater dialog.

With the Radio product, you can subscribe to feeds, they’ll update every hour or so and when you review them, you’ll be able to click on one button and turn that entry in your news aggregator (your RSS feed reader) into an entry in your weblog. Change to any other weblogging tool and you’ll find that you have a multi-step process to go through to read news and make entries out of them.

I’ve been experimenting with Amphetadesk. I simply cannot subscribe (reliably) to as many feeds and count on faithful updates of the news reader. It has promise, but at last look, it’s just not there yet.