"news" in Weblog

I’ve been using Rojo as my RSS reader for about a year now and I love it. I use a tiny fraction of its functionality, to be honest, but it does exactly what I want. I particularly like its recommendation engine - I can click on ‘My feeds’ and be shown entries ordered by my likely interest in them, which suits me much better than strict chronology thanks to the time pressure I’m normally under.

But of everything I most enjoy the weekly Rojo Newsletter. It’s an edited aggregation of the weeks happenings according to the blogosphere. It exposes me to more stuff than I would see in a strictly pull system. I actually think it might be replacing Sunday magazines for me…

I don’t follow the news as closely as I’d like, thanks to time. Being a web professional I have to spend a lot of my weekly reading time keeping up to date with emerging techniques in my field. I used to buy the Sunday papers for a summary of the weeks events and I particularly like the Sunday papers’ magazines. The in-depth articles the magazine format offers help to bring me back up to date with the stories I’ve only followed vaguely. The Rojo Newsletter gives me an overview of what’s been going on but the web format gives me links to more and more and more detail, if I want it.

It’s hard to say how representative I am of other peoples’ reading habits but I can really see more people moving over to this style of news consumption.

Mike’s article on the ABC News Redesign has been discussed elsewhere already but I thought it might be worth drawing attention to his second-to-last paragraph ‘Another business case for web standards’. His business benefits include a 50% reduction in code size and an increased range of ad sizes they can offer thanks to CSS’s flexibility, with the added bonus of the site working on wireless devices. These are the kinds of statistics we need to help sell web standards in the real world so many thanks to Mike for the article.