Keeping in touch through RSS
I have an ongoing interchange with one of my best friends whose favorite repeated saying is, “Dude, you have a blog?” Its not that he has no short-term memory, its that his view on the whole thing is, “If I want to find out how someone is doing, I’ll call them on the phone!” (I’m not going to mention that this guy never actually answers his home phone though).
Yeah, I understand, and I somewhat agree, but the reality is that there is a hell of a lot of low-level activity in all of our lives that is interesting to our friends but not so important as to involve an individual phone call to everyone. And while a huge amount of communications happens over dinner/drinks/biking/snowboarding/whatever, the fact remains that person-to-person communication is a limited channel, especially when everyone is busy busy busy with whatever they’re doing.
While I track somewhere around 150 to 200 individual RSS feeds on a regular basis, the small group of 20 or so friends that maintain blogs are the ones that I try to read every day, as well as where I finding myself commenting the most. This is because its a fantastic way to stay tuned in to my group of friends who I don’t get a chance to see or talk to all that often. And I’d much rather receive information this way rather than in pushed email updates or what not.
Yes, I’m sure to most everyone in the blog space this is old news. Heck, LiveJournal built and sold a whole company based on this idea. To my friends that are reading this, I just wanted to give a quick tip of the hat. To my friends who aren’t well, I guess it doesn’t matter. 
