Well, people, now I know for sure: this English course has been created with the exact purpose of astonishing me week by week! First the surfing of the blogosphere, then the development of a personal blog and now…the discovery of feed aggregators! When Sarah pronounced these words for the first time last Wednesday, I could hardly figure out what she was talking about: the closest thing to a feed aggregator I could think of was the little shelf you can see on the right (I apologize if I didn’t use the right term to define it, but I don’t even know how to call it in Italian!!!). (photo by padday)Once again, I realized the world has moved forward without telling me: now there is an ingenious technology that enables you to have to hand all the news you are interested in and it is called (guess what?) feed aggregator! I have to admit that at first I was really sceptical about the usefulness of this tool: I mean, to check the aggregator you have to connect to the Internet, so why don’t you simply visit the websites to look for new information? What’s the point of resorting to this complicated (I thought it was!) technology?
Maybe I thought we were still in the Middle Ages, when scholars wasted hours and hours looking up something they hadn’t read before in huge dusty volumes, which probably had not been touched for decades…Well, until last Wednesday my situation was not so dissimilar: I –the scholar of the new millennium :-) – checked my favourite websites each time I needed to learn something new, without even knowing if they had been updated since my last visit; therefore my expectations were often disappointed and after reading all the pages through and clicking all the links I realized that nothing new had been added recently. “Great”, I thought, “I wasted half an hour and I didn’t find anything, I will have to check again tomorrow…how boring!”
photo by somefool
I was sure that I would be condemned to this agony for the rest of my life, but now I have to change my mind: no more afternoons spent surfing pointlessly the Net, the feed aggregator is working for you! You simply have to subscribe to the websites you love the most and the update will be sent you automatically; you don’t even need to look for it scrolling up and down the page because the aggregator selects the new pieces of information and display them on your screen, thus bringing your effort to naught! That’s what I call “smart technology”! What’s more, you can also create your personal playlist and catalogue your subscriptions by category. For example, thanks to my friend Martina’s irreplaceable help, I divided the websites I chose into groups:
- Group B: containing my groupmates’ blogs;
- My friends' blogs: containing other friends’ blogs;
- My interests: containing everything I'm more keen on (recipes, travels...) and some websites where I can find useful information (such as BBC and CNN news, National Geographic).
As you can see, I abandoned my scepticism and I’ve become an “aggregator lover"!
