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Okay, now maybe a different thought on how to follow this blog or any other.  I have used many very good readers, some computer based (great for off-line reading) and some on-line readers (perfect for traveling and you don't have your computer, smart phone, and whatever comes next.)

Please, follow me on this one.  As great, and I mean that, as the above and many other readers are, there is a new kid on the block.  It is called, diffbot.  Simple to find: http://www.diffbot.com.  While it is still in beta and has been for a while, it is hot, the way to keep track of your content of interest, allowing you to add your own tags, offering up simple notices of changes to the blogs and other sites you are following or are interested in the sites topic.  However, there is much more, such as, it doesn't need a XML feed, it doesn't need anything but the site's address.  If the user wants a convential feed, diffbot makes that a simple task.

This next part may not be all that important to everyone, but, this is a stylish on-line program.  At the same time, it helps keep you abreast of your favorite topics, content, and sites.

To be safe, keep what you are using, please.  Then, head over to http://www.diffbot.com and sign-up and give it the information it needs to make your reading and information gathering experiences much cleaner and more pleasant to read.  Once you have a good number of pages/feeds which you are following, you will see how much control you have over every feed/bookmarke in how the are presented to you.

I love things that are cool, but they have to work, and work well.  Diffbot has managed, I believe, to jump ahead of any on-line reader and to give a much different experience to those with some very good programming on their systems. No, I get nothing for recommending this reader.  I don't get any sort of renumeration for anything, from software to hardware to books to whatever, I just like to share things that are cool (I admit that), but, mostly, that do what they are primarily intended to do.  Diffbot does that uniquely and with style.  I find nothing wrong with a bit of style.

From the source:

by mike on Jul 07, 2009

Back in 1956, first-term President Eisenhower, who had served as Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe during WWII, recognized the need for a distributed national defense network for transporting military units and supplies in times of invasion. Thus was the beginning of the largest public works project in modern history--the Interstate Highway System, a single road network connecting all major cities in the U.S.

About a decade later, another military-commissioned, decentralized network was born: the Internet. Like the interstate, the Internet connected local networks into a unified graph with a common protocol. Both were to be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. Instead of moving vehicles carrying physical goods, the Internet moved packets carrying information payloads.

Large systems that move stuff at higher and higher speeds quickly create issues of safety and reliability. At higher speeds, you have smaller margins for error. The higher speeds of highway driving prompted revolutionary advancements in seatbelt, airbag, and ABS technology. Because of the split-second reaction times required of the driver at high speeds, car dashboards are one of the most highly tuned user interfaces today.

As for the user of the Internet, despite the gazillion-fold increase in speeds since its inception, the tools of access have largely stagnated. In the early days of the internet, slow transfer speeds and high costs ensured that only the highest quality content was posted. Users simply wouldn't tolerate spending their scarce monthly quota hours (remember those AOL CDs?) to wait for the crappy stuff to load.

Today, we live in an era of content abundance. Falling unit prices for storage and transfer have created an environment where bits surge in volume and velocity and our attention span, not our modem line, is the bottleneck. An entire article can be re-blogged, mass e-mailed, or re-tweeted with a single click. The display of content has been reduced to eye catching sensational headlines competing for page views and ad revenue (used Digg?). This culture of attention competition inevitably leads to information overload and bias. At worst, it leads to entire nations of people going to war based on unfounded information and perceptions.

There needs to be a better way.

We start by creating the first real tools for managing content on the web. Web content has so far evaded information management tools because the very nature of web documents is that they don't have a standardized structure. There's no equivalent of Microsoft Outlook for the web because unlike email, which has a fixed sender-subject-message structure, web documents can be layed-out in any manner. Diffbot is a project to automatically and reliably create a structured view for any page on the web. By doing this, we can begin to manage:

Bias. A truly unbiased view of the world can only come if you can receive information from any source, not just sources that publish structured feeds. Relying on the entire web, not just the RSS-powered crowd, is the way of breaking out of the Web 2.0 monoculture.

Veracity. By tracking information as it evolves through time and sources, we can cluster and trace articles talking about the same story as they spread through the Internet. Tracing the source of the information allows us to discern fact from rumor.

As you can see, techniques for managing web information are only in their infancy. Large players are finally acknowledging this need and we should see many exciting developments soon. Stay tuned for a new product to be released by the Diffbot team later this year that helps bring us one step closer to sanity!