Feed My Inbox — RSS feeds by email
Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks: I like to get information by email. I prefer listserves over online forums and email to IM. And I don't like having to look at a web page/feed reader every day to find out whether anything new has appeared on an RSS feed. I want information to come to me -- I don't want to seek it out.
I'm testing a solution that will deliver RSS updates to me via email: Feed My Inbox I'm starting with a few sites I want to track, but that are only updated occasionally. I hope that it finds the updates accurately and doesn't overwhelm me with tons of email. And I hope it stays in business -- it looks like many competitors have gone under.
I also think that www.feedburner.com (now owned by Google) will do this, but I found the instructions impenetrable.
Filed in Web 2 Comments so far
Peter Campbell on 04 Oct 2009 at 12:11 pm #
I find this really confusing. If you don’t want to subscribe to information by RSS, then don’t. If you would prefer that RSS info come to you in your email application rather than a separate RSS application, then use an email application that can subscribe to RSS feeds (Thunderbird, Outlook 2007, almost anything current).
Personally, I choose to receive information by RSS, and ironically for the exact same reason that you eschew it: I want the information to come to me, I don’t want to have to go browse around to get it. So I have Google Reader set to open when I open Firefox, and I don’t close it — it’s always in the second tab in my browser, right next to GMail. And, with Google Reader, I have an application that is designed for browsing news feeds. The navigational tools understand that i don’t want to read everything that comes in; they let me conveniently star things so that i can sweep my feeds for the good stuff and only browse through the ones I was looking for; and they let me star (save), tag, share, tweet, bookmark (at delicious) or do any number of appropriate things that I might want to do with an interesting article or blog post.
For a pertinent example, I subscribe to this blog in my RSS reader (that’s where I found this article). I have, in the past, read articles here that i thought that my community might enjoy. So I have clicked a checkbox to share them. Because I feed my Google Reader Shared items automatically to my website, my Facebook page, and the @techcafeteria Twitter account, I have, with one click, distributed/recommended your article to everyone I know who might be interested. Can you do that from your email application?
I can understand why people who are not interested in reading much information hate RSS (or think they do). I can’t understand why intelligent people, who do read a fair amount of Internet-based information and would like to do it efficiently, without wasting a lot of time and with the appropriate information-handling tools at their fingertips, won’t take the time to learn and appreciate what a good RSS Reader can do to dramatically improve their information reviewing experience.
And I think that email applications are already burdened beyond their basic functionality by all of the spam, email lists, advertising and other junk that makes dealing with each message individually an information management nightmare. Personally, my email is the last place that I want my RSS feeds.
FYI, I wrote a detailed article on what RSS can be used for and the many tools that you can use, here: Using RSS Tools to Feed Your Information Needs.
Robert on 04 Oct 2009 at 5:28 pm #
Peter,
I, too, always have a tab with my RSS reader open. But then I forget to look at it. And some of the info I want only comes in RSS format.
I need things to walk right up to me and tap me on the shoulder. Waiting patiently to be noticed doesn’t work. Anyway, like Sly Stone said, diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.
And thanks for the link to your extensive article!