My First Time Subscribing to an RSS Feed

After reading Shel Hotz’s article, How the social evolution process has altered my FIR news-gathering process, I finally had the better understanding I needed, essentially the how’s and why’s, to subscribe to my first RSS Feed. As I eagarly await my first slew of feeds via smartphone, I can share with the comment I left Shel over on his blog.

This article made my day because as someone who has never subscribed to any RSS feeds, I now have a better idea of the why’s and how’s. I can remember when the iPhone first came out I had a ton of friends telling me how great the RSS feeds were, and especially the convenience they brought, but I was always hesitant, mostly because I enjoyed browsing the actual sites rather than getting a quick stream of info. If I had known that you could actually store and save the news, it might had been a different story. Now that I have my own social media blog that offers the feature to have my readers subscribe via RSS, I might just give it a try myself. I’m also looking forward to checking out FeedDemon and NewGator. Thanks for the heads up, Shel.

Update: When going through the sites I read on a daily basis to find my first RSS Feed to subscribe to I ultimately decided to go with celebrity gossip queen, Perez Hilton. Seeing that I visit that site 3 to 5 times a day, why not take advantage of the RSS Feed so I could stop wasting valuable study time and instead check the feed during my commute. So far I am really enjoying reading through his RSS Feed.

Wedbush’s ‘Second Internet’: A New Dawn Is Upon Us

Los Angeles based, Wedbush Securites, just released an interesting study about how the ‘net can be clearly divided into two distinct parts: The First Internet and The Second Internet. Leave it David E. Henson’s, The Scary and Fast Rise of The Second Internet to help make it easier to decipher all of Wedbush’s new information.

Dividing the ‘net into two categories, First/1994-2009, and Second/2009 to present, Wedbush argues that our online future “moves much faster than First Internet, is much bigger than the First Internet” and will benefit from being more “social” and allowing API to have the readers play a huge role in how The Second is modeled and shaped.

One of Wedbush’s charts that I found the most interesting was one that showed how the Huffington Post is nearly tied with the NY Times for online news visitors. This ties in greatly to what we’ve been studying about how curation might actually be the future of journalism.

Here’s my response to both the Wedbush info and David’s article:

I can appreciate Wedbush’s research paper for its solid charts that give us a clear picture of how the web has changed and is rapidly growing, but I’m not entirely convinced that we can divide the ‘net into two distinct categories. I would argue that 2003-2009 could be placed in a separate category, perhaps “the First and then some Internet,” because the “The Social Internet” was essentially created and perfected during those years. Like my classmate, Breanna, I also use both First and Second Internet sites on a daily basis, and I don’t really see that changing. Speaking on behalf of someone who has never read Huffington Post and has no plans to in the future, I think it has set the standard for “curated” news sites. One point that really stood out to me was when Wedbush said the Second Internet “would usher in another period of great wealth creation.”  If the Second Internet can help fix our economy, then I’m all for standing behind this argument.