A week ago, my manager pulls me aside and shows me a list of all the web sites that I had hit the previous month, since I was in the “Top 10” users of the ‘net that month. What makes me laugh about this is that I was not in the Top 10 for the previous few years! Also, the way our company “measures” Internet usage is inaccurate – the number of web hits in a month is meaningless – and this seems to be the only measurement they are using. What about amount of data transferred per site, or the amount of time per site?

Anyway, the gist of all this is that after explaining why my usage is “up” and why I expected it to go much higher, is from the use of RSS feeds. Once she understood what RSS was, she asked if I would present an overview at our next team meeting at the end of April. So I’m going to start reviewing low/no cost RSS readers over the next few weeks. The emphasis will be on ease of use, features, cost, performance. I’ll try to be impartial, but I’ll admit up front that I’ve been using RSS/ATOM/XML aggregators for over 2 years now and have found what works for me – though I’m always looking for something better.

So watch over the next several weeks, I’ll have some reviews up for your review!