What The Hell Is So Good About Blogs

Every once in a while, I will call time-out from music to tell you about something I think you'll find useful. Whether it's music-related or not.

This is gonna make me sound like a salesman for a second, but I'm not selling anything. All of what I'm about to discuss is free, and I found it useful, so I thought maybe you would too.

Imagine if you had an inbox - just like an email inbox - for all the info you liked best on the Internet. One place you could go to check out what was new on every one of your favorite web sites, and cherry-pick which items you'd like to read.

Here's why you should get an RSS reader (relax, it's easy):

Let's say you have a set of web sites that you like to check out fairly regularly. News, sports, celebrity stalker photos, etc. What you may not realize is that most of these sites provide RSS feeds of their content. They "broadcast" all their articles on this feed.

So, if you have an RSS reader, like the free Google Reader, you can "subscribe" to the feeds from all your favorite sites. Then you can read everything from a single site (in this example, your Google Reader homepage), with handy links back to all the original sites. It makes it much, much faster and easier to keep up with all your info sources. No ads. No clutter.

Besides music, I subscribe to blogs on people who receive ridiculous passive-aggressive notes, getting rich, gluten-free cooking, ESPN and the NYTimes. And a mess of other stuff. It's addicting.

Of course, you'd want to subscribe to this blog before anything else, right? Right.

Let me know if you find any more good ones.