Context

There are a number of blogs that I read, almost daily. I know a lot of people do this and many do it by subscribing to the RSS feed of a given blog. I am not one of those people. Why? I like to see the information in its original context. RSS readers strip everything off the webpage except the text of the post. So just by glance, I can’t tell which website the post came from. I don’t like this at all. I prefer to read the text on the original site that the author created. Why? It helps me to remember where I read the information. A typical example, just the other day, I was thinking that there was a book I was interested in reading because I had read about it on some website. It was a somewhat technical book, so it could have been reviewed on any number of sites that I visit. However, I couldn’t remember the title and I didn’t think it was an actual review of the book. I was something written by the person who wrote the book. I remembered liking the post, but all I could remember was that I had read about it in December and it was to be published in January. Now that it was January, I wanted to remember it to see if I wanted to buy it. After picturing the article, I remembered that it was on the NY Times website. I like that my brain still had the connection of where I read the article. I supposed if I read it in an RSS feed (which I don’t even know if the NY Times provides), I could have looked there somehow. But I think it’s good for my brain to still be making connections like this. It’s probably more inefficient to read blogs this way, but it’s my preferred way. And I’m also not a fan of making everything more efficient. Inefficiency is good. But that’s a post for another day.