To drink our information straight from the river with our cupped hands instead of buying a half liter bottle from the corner store. And you’re right, most people don’t need RSS readers. You might think there’s no need for something like that to exist in a world with Twitter and Facebook or whatever social network you like to use. Their content comes to you instead of you having to go find their content. Instead of going to your favorite websites over and over again, multiple times a day, to see if anything happened, you instead use an RSS reader (invented by Dave Winer, pictured above) to “subscribe” to those sites. What is RSS? You’re reading this, so you already know, but for those who don’t, it’s a really simply concept to understand. No, today I subscribe to less than 50 feeds, but those 50 feeds mean the world to me since it’s how I stay on top of everything. Back when I discovered the protocol, I quickly ended up subscribing to well over 200 feeds, which caused me to nearly lose my mind. Now granted, I don’t use RSS like I used to.

It’s not free, which immediately makes it uninteresting to 90% of you, but you know what? You get what you pay for.įor the reasonable price of $24 per year, you too can use the tool I’ve been using for the past 48 hours to consume what I like to think is the world’s most important information. But before I do, I owe it to you to tell you about one of my new favorite web services. In one hour I’m going to turn off my laptop and go outside to enjoy some fresh air.

Google reader air