The Future of Blogging and Web Feeds (e.g RSS and ATOM)

The Future of Blogging and Web Feeds (e.g RSS and ATOM)

Two articles at Newsday.com contain AP reports involving blogging on the one hand and web feeds on the other. Although apparently contradictory, the news reports are in fact complimentary.

Anick Jesdanun writes in an article entitled
Study: Blogging Still Infrequent
that blogging is not as pervasive as it was expected to be, although the expectation that everyone will "blog" privately is in my opinion a false expectation. The world can not merely consist of "writers", there must be "readers" as well.

The fact is that blogging types of communication and their offshoots are expanding.

In an article by Frank Bajak entitled Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing, we find important discussion of one of the spin-offs of blogging, i.e. the increasing popularity of web feeds by RSS or competing ATOM technology (used by Google's Blogger).

I myself already have the reasonably priced news aggregator Newsgator integrated into Outlook and can confirm what Bajak writes in his article, that web feeds via RSS, ATOM and coming technologies are here to stay.

Moreover, web feeds of blogs will be one of our major sources of news and information in the future, and I predict that web feeds will become one of the primary methods of information interchange in the sciences and a host of other areas where "subscription" to selected information and sources is an effective alternative to more antiquated methods of data gathering.