Life Is A Feed

As blogs and aggregators continue to gain in adoption and importance, I predict that one of the most important effects will be changing the way we think about our daily activities.

The experience of reading an RSS aggregator forces one to develop the ability to rapidly switch context between different domains. I compare it to my customary habit of reading 4 to 6 books and magazines at once: One in the bathroom, one in the living room, one in the office, and one in the car.

As more and more people start looking at life as a series of feeds, the lines between blogs, books, magazines, television, movies, and interacting with other people will blur. After all, what is episodic television other than a weekly multimedia feed? Taking it a step further, isn’t the weekly family dinner a feed as well?

Will we someday use “life aggregators” to place all of our feeds, online, broadcast, and offline into a master UI? Something to ponder….

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By the way, here’s an update on the Hitler ads:

Dave Winer, being a generally honorable fellow, has admitted some wrongdoing in his criticism of the Hitler ads. Better yet, he linked to Scott McNulty’s critique of his actions. Essentially, Scott points out the inconsistency in Dave asserting back in January that MoveOn.org had a First Amendment right to show anti-Bush ads featuring Hitler, and complaining now that Bush should be ashamed of using the anti-Bush imagery in his own ads.

On a side note, I’m reading Edmund Morris’ biography of Teddy Roosevelt. If you think politics today is worse than the past, you’re guilty of nostalgia and sentimentality. Politics was, is, and always will be a bare-knuckle brawl. The sooner people accept that, to sooner we can move past moralizing to actually getting things done.