Ted Leung recently noted his blog-aversary. This reminded me that I’ve been reading feeds for 6-7 years. Shifting from reading centralized media like CNET, Infoworld and even Slashdot to individuals like Matt Webb, Brent Simmons and Simon Willison was an important event. For me, it was one of those moments where you realize there’s a whole other world of cool stuff to discover, explore and take part in. Certainly I would have a completely different character if I hadn’t discovered people out there on the web, doing their own cool stuff.
When I first started reading feeds, I experimented with some Linux stuff, most notably the crazy AmphetaDesk. I quickly settled into loving NetNewsWire. It was the first app I purchased when I got a Mac, and I still use it every day, to this day. Call me a feed reading curmudgeon, but I still think it’s the best way to keep up with lots of sites.
I’ve gone through some shifts in the kinds of feeds I read. I discovered feeds and blogging by Dave Winer, so I started reading him and the people in his sphere of influence. I quickly figured out that said sphere is an odd social environment that has little relevance to what I do as a developer. For a while, I subscribed to the “must read” influencers, such as Boing Boing. I quickly found that firehose was too strong and, again, not relevant enough.
So instead of trying to figure those worlds out, I started reading more coders. Somehow that lead from reading people who do front-end coding to reading design stuff, which proved quite interesting. These days I’ve been subscribing to people writing about information design, visualization, open source hardware, game criticism and urban design. I’m finding lots of awesome there.
