RSS and Information Overload

I believe people who know themselves and their time constraints very well can benefit greatly from the use of RSS aggregators. Theoretically, they exist to save people time and battle information overload. The purpose of aggregators is to bring together only the information that people want/need and omit the rest. By collecting information for users, putting it in a similar format, and by making it easily and readily available, RSS aggregators provide a valuable service.

Problems arise when people underestimate the time the RSS aggregators save them and overestimate how much more they can handle reading due to this newfound free time. It is so simple to subscribe to an RSS feed, and there is so much interesting information available on the Internet. It’s easy to over-subscribe and overload yourself with information that you’ve had collected. If RSS is used wisely, it saves time. If RSS feeds are collected the way kids collect free candy, information overload is inevitable.