Monday, February 01, 2010

Jolly Good Fellows

There are many reasons to like RSS feeds. The efficiency and economy of receiving news as it comes to hand. The egalitarianism of the headlines. But my favourite feature is the random juxtaposition of stories.

For example, there's an incisive glimpse at 1840's America from Andrew Sullivan at the rise, stagger and fall of the jolly good fellows. The very next headline from onegoodmove highlights a QI episode looking at the Great Disappointment of 1844:



Interesting stuff indeed.

TVNZ and TV3 may one day include their "blogs" with RSS feeds as part of the game, but I doubt it. Pageviews is the advertisers' game, not just the news. I'll just have to visit the two Tims (Watkin & Wilson) and Younger Espiner at TVNZ as well as Jeremy Elwood and Duncan Garner at TV3 with old-fashioned manual dexterity.