Inspired by this post and recalling a conversation I had a couple weeks ago with Korby I began to notice how my own news/blog reading changed for the better once I started doing it efficiently.  The problem discussed was about how certain individuals are considered “A-List“ and have been idolized;  potentially without Merritt. As an example think about how “The Crew” at Channel9 holds themselves above the “Current Users“.  Are they“guruizing“ these individuals above the important ones... the readers who are online?  Beyond Channel9, does Scoble, and his kind, get undeserved attention?  Who gave them these powers and do they abuse them?

You did.  Maybe not you, but in general I'm betting that you read Scobles posts before anyone else's.  Statistics show that most people who read blogs don't do so with an aggregator. You probably are reading this with a web browser.  This means that you are forced to pick and choose who you browse to first.  You pick the “A-List“.  I did it too.  I would read Scoble, Joel, and Raymond and maybe some of the people they would link to.  Other than this, the time it would take to web browse between blogs limited me to clicking on my trackbacks and referrals.  I read them because they were the first that came to mind when you would ask people “Who should I read?“.  Beyond this I do believe that they had something to do with their guru status. At least, at first, they had to have.  They discussed something controversial, attention grabbing, or interesting.  And I read them today so they still must. 

Back to the subject.  It has been a few weeks since I set up over 1k blogs in my aggregator, RSS Bandit, and starting reading everything from the bottom up out of the “Unread Items“ folder.  My minor observation is that by scanning everything one at a time with the up arrow I've democratized my blog reading. Now I read what my mind thinks is interesting rather than only a select few entries.  Its amazing how quickly you can scan text content to find the best posts when drop the browser dependency you have the help of good rich client software.  It goes beyond the “A-List“ I have all of my news feeds mixed in as well, but now, as long as the news service offers an RSS feed, I pick which articles to read based on content rather than the source. It feels liberating. I still stop on the “A-Listers“, but now its when they write something worth reading. 

My second observation is that this scenario goes a step towards proving to me that the web browser as we know it has reached its limits.  It really is not meant for the type of information overload people are going to be demanding, searching through, and filtering every day.  Cool, connected rich clients are poised to take off, especially when Avalon and the longhorn wave hits the masses.

It hit me again today when I browsed to Safeway.com to order groceries. I was online, but it still took me to long to browse for and order everything I need.  I would LOVE to have a rich client app for this that would speed things up with an optimized local cache and enable me to easily add items to my list no matter what the state of my Internet connection without having to log into the web site.  Until my Fridge orders food for me I think it would be the next best thing.  If you are Safeway you should want to do this because then you own the client experience without having to worry about browser compatibility and it would do more to “lock in“ buyers since they will have formed a deeper connection by installing your client.

Ok, this post was a LOT longer than I EVER intended.  Basically, I think I just said that you should be using a rich client to do your blog reading because it will be faster and will shift your reading from “A-List“ to interesting.  Once you do this you won't go back, you'll realize the limitations of the web browser, and you'll start wondering what else you do online that could be enhanced with a great local client.