Feeds vs. Favorites
There used to be entire magazines devoted to “Favorites”—interesting/useful web sites—so one Blog entry about this matter can’t hurt more than a stack of Yahoo! Internet Life back issues. Continuing to work with my “XML Favorites for Windows,” I see the opportunity to reduce the number of links to web pages as their “feed” equivalent dominates with convenience. It’s not quite putting the kinté links page out of business but I do find that this page is less and less there for my ‘personal’ use. I leave many links there because of my assumption that others out there in the kinté space have not taken advantage of using “feeds” instead of Favorites. Simultaneously, there are web sites that simply do not have feeds. And, of course, there are sites that require a favorite link—web applications like those listed “Consumer Items” among the kinté links. And now some random shots:
- I wanted to have a Favorite for every hardware and software online store shopped by me. I did this for the novelty and to indirectly share my tastes with the public. The novelty has vanished… and my taste? Sharing? Hmm…
- A lot of links were kept for one-time novelty like the bushgame.com. But now they can be stored in a Blog for posterity.
- I still keep many links out of respect for acquaintances or because of the ancient practice called “link exchange.”
By the way, the Wikipedia is an excellent source for current links about encyclopedic subjects. A great example of this is their entry for PhotoShop. I’m not a consumer of the design press so it has literally taken me years to find decent Web sites about this tool. I was wondering when the desire to publish paper-based and CD-ROM based Photoshop would no longer prevent folks from “giving” some of it away “for free” online.