There’s a guy at work who I enjoy regular chats with about all sorts of stuff. Recently there’s been a lot of talk about Web2 and E2. I actually really enjoy our chats since he is the most sceptical bloke ever. You might be surprised but I find it quite useful. If I can sell stuff to him then I can sell it to anyone. I like to think I’m single handedly responsible for him now being addicted to both social bookmarking and wiki’s. He’s still a little shy on the blogging side, like a lot of people he’s more of a blurker than a full on contributor, but as long as he’s getting something out of it then that’s OK by me. During our chats I always seem to end up using a lot of analogies to try and explain why E2 stuff is good. Stuff like, “Blogs are just the corridor conversations of the Internet” and “Social Bookmarking is like a Google search with a personal recommendation!”

So he came along today, obviously with a little time on his hands and he opened the conversation in his usual style…”What crap have you found on the Internet this week then?” I’d actually had a little bit of a quiet week this week and after I’d pointed him to Cookshow.com and a little rant by Charlie Brooker that I enjoyed I didn’t have much else. So I fired up Newsgator.

“Bloody hell! How do you keep on top of that?” was his first remark when he saw that I had 188 unread articles. Now this guy is getting a little old and a little forgetful (I really hope he doesn’t read this!) so he didn’t remember that information overload is one of my favourite topics and that we’d talked about it before.

First off I had to remind him that it’s my choice to have that much information coming to me, if I didn’t want to read it I wouldn’t subscribe.

He thought I was mad.

So I cracked out the big guns, the tried and tested analogy, the common example…the RSS vs newspaper comparison!

So the conversation went…

Me - Do you buy a Sunday newspaper? (For anyone who has bought a Sunday broadsheet recently you’ll already realise where this is going to go. They’re so big these days you need a truck to take them home.)
Him - Yeah
Me - And you pay £2 for it?
Him - About that.
M - Do you read it all?
H - No, that would take forever.
M - Do you get it yet?
H - Get what?
M - That’ll be a no then. So how do you select what you read and what you don’t read in the paper?
H - I look at the headlines and pick the interesting ones to read.
M - Watch…

That’s when I pick a feed and scroll through, running my finger down the screen. Didn’t see any I liked so marked them all as read and watched them disappear. I did this a few times and soon got the unread articles down to about 20. I think it took me about 45 seconds to get them down to 6 that looked vaguely interesting and then I got rid of those too. All in all I got through them all in about a minute and a half whilst talking him through what I was doing.

The penny dropped. I gave him the Newsgator URL, I told him how to get an internal RSS reader, I showed him how easy he could add feeds to both and off he toddled.

Another happy customer, another RSS user, another step in the right direction.