I just realised why I don’t use RSS readers very often – you can’t create content with them.
I doubt there will ever be one tool to rule them all – Facebook is trying very hard in this area – but I want to minimise the number of ways I have of keeping up with and contributing to communities both inside and outside my company.
To successfully follow communities an RSS reader beats visiting each one manually but if I want to contribute I have to step outside the RSS reader.
RSS makes perfect sense for (say) news, eg The Guardian – where I do use RSS – but apart from that I don’t ‘consume’ that much (note to self, reconsider intent to purchase an iPad 2).
When it comes to active participation I find myself being sucked back into communities that run on email – the lowest common denominator in more than one sense. Other communities get less attention, eg Facebook. In some ways the communities that are a priority for me do tend to end up in my INBOX. Others have to wait until I have time to browse.
Are there any RSS readers that will let you post content?
A quick search suggests not and I suspect the problem is not the tools but the lack of a common protocol to post content.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that I tend towards producing and less consuming?
