It's the context

I tried Google Reader over the weekend... in yet another attempt to see why Doc Searls finds RSS readers so incredibly valuable... it played a bit... and left it cold.. just like all the other times I tried out an RSS reader.

It's dawned on me that the reason I don't "get" RSS... is that it has negative value for me. RSS is great if you just want to consume as much content as possible... but I like to keep things in context.

Context is a very important factor in the process of taking raw data and turning it into knowledge. Its also a very powerful antiseptic for spam. That's why I'm willing to put up with the inefficiencies of seeing things twice or more, manually pruing a tree of bookmarks, and manually typing in some important URLs from time to time, including: (Lets see how many I get right)

• http://doc.weblogs.com
• http://digg.com
• http://homepage.mac.com/dave_rogers
• http://boingboing.net
• http://metafilter.com
• http://steves-digicams.com
• http://slashdot.org

I've been going through the whole HP laptop saga, along with server games at work... so I've been using a lot of temporary workstations lately... you get used to this. I finally got my desktop machine at work back in shape... it's nice to be able to have a context for things that'll be stable.

I think we need to remember what the original foundation of this is... WWW... World Wide Web... it's the connections and linkage that make things valuable. Google couldn't work without it, and neither would Blogs, Podcasts, or any of the other things we're now building into social layers and infrastructure on top of it.

It's a value subtractive process to strip away context, with the added costs of spam and system gaming that can take place once there's absolutely no identity tied to anything.

Just like in real estate... it's all about Location, Location... and Location...

The web is all about it as well.

Thanks for your time and attention.

--Mike--