I’m about to undergo a monthlong experiment. For the next 30 days, I will not use NetNewsWire.

NetNewsWire is an RSS reader for Macs. For those who haven’t yet had the woozy warmth of RSS shot into their veins, RSS is the way that web sites (like crabwalk.com) atomize their content into individual chunks — like, say, this post — and make them readable en masse. RSS makes it much easier to track many more web sites than one could by visiting them individually.

RSS is awesome.

But it’s also addictive. I currently track 338 web sites through NetNewsWire. And I check them all (with very rare exceptions) every morning and every night. Out of all those sites I probably skim 400 posts and actually read roughly 150 of them. Every day.

This is crazy. It’s good for you, The Reader, because the best of what I find often ends up on crabwalk.com. But man, it’s a time suck. I figure it’s roughly equivalent to reading the full text of The New York Times and The Washington Post every day. Not a bad thing, of course — just time-consuming.

So for the next month, no NetNewsWire. I promise I will be less knowledgable about a thousand different subjects come December 1. I will likely be less entertaining to talk to at parties. Posting here may slow. But I’ll have many more hours available for other things.

What will I fill those hours with? Well, that’s a different experiment.

01 November 2006

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