I'll admit that I am late to most of the internet parties. I was there with Mosaic and Netscape betas while at university but since then I can only say I've been a bit 'slow'. My latest realization is that RSS readers are the best way to read the internet.

So what's happened to make me realize this? I first tried to use RSS about three years ago. I had two problems with it:

• too much information flooding in
• poor client

The primary reason for using the RSS reader three years ago was to keep up to date with an intranet wiki. It changed all the time as the project changed and I had hundreds of RSS entries in my RSS reader everyday. Most of which I didn't care about. This was combined with a poor RSS reader that I don't remember the name of. It crashed all the time. It didn't allow searching of feeds. It didn't allow hierarchical feeds so I couldn't group similar feeds together. Basically it was awful. So I made the mistake of blaming RSS (the technology)and going back to normal browsing. After all normal browsing had been fine for the preceding 9 years.

A few months ago I found myself using Doggdot to aggregate slashdot, digg and del.icio.us. I was reading it ALL the time. Every hour or so as I scanned it for changes. This was working really well. It optimized my web usage allowing me to get more geek info in less time. Leaving me more time to work... or maybe more time to wait for the next update So a few months or so pass and things are still working really well. Then it dawns on me that doggdot is really just aggregating three of the big sites I graze on during the day. What about OSNews, BBC News, TUAW, MacNN, Joel On Software, The Daily WTF etc. Most of these sites I go to and nothing has changed. I enjoy browsing around looking for new things but it can be a waste of time. Then it dawned on me. Maybe I should look at RSS again. After all it was made to solve the problem I have.

So I looked for a free RSS client for OSX and found Vienna. Vienna is a pretty good RSS reader. Certainly a lot better then the client I used three years ago. Firstly it allows me to group feeds making it a lot easier to navigate. Secondly it allows me to search those feeds. I'm pretty sure it has embedded Webkit as well so it basically has a mini version of Safari's render engine in it. When you click on a link it opens an embedded browser. I like this. I like it even more as I know I can turn it off and tell it to use my chosen external browser if I ever run in to trouble.

So how does this help? Well basically it means I can 'Eat like a bird' (part of 'Eat like a bird, shit like an elephant'). I can quickly scan hundreds of headlines every hour or so and see what interests me and what doesn't. If I spent more time I could even get optimized feeds from digg and reddit for things that are more likely to interest me... but that is for another day.

Anyway, as you can see I have a lot to read