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Monday, October 27, 2008

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

{link » An Instructive Candidacy: What Sarah Palin taught us about ourselves.}
“I don’t know whether Sarah Palin would make a great vice president. But I did learn that by the standard of John Kerry’s pick of John Edwards, and now Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden, as running mates, she is wise and ethical beyond their measure.”
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
But, but ... Victor, she apparently doesn't read a daily newspaper. There are those who feel this constitutes de facto disqualification from political leadership. Anywhere in the world, no less.

I imagine, however, there could be rational explanations for such seemingly-shocking deficiency of intellectual curiosity. For example, she might rely on an online feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply aggregator. This is client software or a web application which aggregates syndicated web content (RSS)‡ such as news, blog posts, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing. I find that to be much more efficient than leafing through a rag like the New York Times or WaPo (both of which have for years disgraced their former standing as national newspapers of record), which requires more time than most busy people have on a daily basis, and gets ink on your fingers (and pollutes your brain with flagrant bias) that needs to be washed off when you are done so you can venture into polite society and even shake hands.

I suppose most national political leaders have human-staff news-aggregators who assemble an executive summary for their boss to brief her over her morning coffee. Besides which, today's national leaders can't be bothered with what any one paper edition has to say. Most of these fish wrappers present a biased and narrow view of information that, moreover, is stale relative to our fast moving world.

I personally haven't had time or use for paper news in years (it's so Second Millennium), though admittedly I have no leadership aspirations. I'm retired.


‡ From Feed 101:
What are feeds? I see "RSS", "XML", and "Atom" out there, but I don't know how I might use these links when I find them.

Feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere.
Furthermore: Newspaper Circulation Continues Its Decline!

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