Friday, August 20, 2010

How do you consume media?

How do you consume media?: Reading Chris Hayes talk about his media diet is a good excuse to spend some time talking about my own. I'm dissatisfied with it. [...] But if I'm attracted to Twitter, I'm reliant on RSS feeds. Full RSS feeds, to be more specific. My information consumption is overwhelmingly biased toward outlets I can read fully in Google Reader. That cuts out a few blogs I'd like to read more of, but not that many. What it does do is bias me in favor of blogs and against newspaper articles, magazines and so forth.

I too am biased in toward sources that I can read fully in Reader, like Klein's blog. It gives me a very efficient way of scanning a lot of new material quickly, diving into the most interesting ones, following links if they look promising. I'd rather see RSS and Reader extended and improved than have all the current thrashing about media formats, channels, and monetization. Not surprisingly, many prefer to hype a new way of doing things over improving something that already works, but is for that reason unsexy.

1 comment:

steve said...

This issue of unsexiness of certain types of innovation needs to be addressed. I find myself looking at iPad rss readers for bits and hints of innovation. Nothing earthchanging, but perhaps we will only see improvement by having amateurs work in these "uninteresting" areas.

This extends everywhere. In the energy game the biggest bang for the buck is conservation followed by efficiency, but both of those are unsexy when compared with new production. Such a waste of innovative talent.