Podcasting or Blogging text?

Podcasting and text blogging are actually mediums very different from each other, and it is not fair to compare them with each other.

Podcasting uses sound files to transmit information and is more suited for people who prefer listening to reading .Podcasting may actually be the first choice when the material being podcasted is about some language training or music lessons.In such scenarios text blogging is often a poor choice.For most other purposes I think text blogging should be chosen. Not only it makes easier for the readers/audience , because they can glimpse at a post and summarize it(which they cant do in a podcast), but also for reasons such as server space. Sound files are usually large and consume considerable disk space. Text on the other hand is extremely light on storage.

Other than this, I think searching for the location of a given information is very easy in a text blog and is very difficult in a podcast .Till the time technology advances so much that audio materials are appropriately tagged and a good search within the audio content is possible, I think text is the way to go.

Information Overload with Rss

I think Rss and Rss Aggregators actually aggravate the problem of information overload.Rss and Rss Aggregators were created to manage the information overload.Ideally a user would not like to visit the blogs daily and get lost in information .However, in my opinion a person who needs the information so badly will always go and visit the actual site and not trust the aggregator, because aggregators have been known for notorious issues such delay and sometimes marking un read posts marked read etc.

I had tried feedburner for this blog sometime back.Inorder to employ the feedburner, I had to read through a number of articles on feeds and feedburners.Reading so much about feeds and feedburners had really agonized me. Is it not contradictory that something which is supposed to take care of information overload is causing overload itself?


Finally, I also feel that a person who is already bogged down by information will never have the time to read the blog posts which he/she so painstakingly subscribes to. I recall the times when I had to sort through my favorites folder and delete the links which I did not visit more than couple of times. I am sure very soon people will find themselves managing and sorting feed digests.

Personalization-Too much too good?

This is something I love to debate to myself for prolonged hours. What with all those Phishing scams and third party cookie setters who cleverly invite you to their sites, I would always treat my personal 'personal notebook' with the same respect and care that I would give to a public computer. This would translate as not saving my email address for either Yahoo or Hotmail, never allowing broswers to remember passwords and never ever clicking 'remember me' checkboxes.

To contradict myself , I have been doing all of the things mentioned in paragraph above all of the time. I keep myself signed in linked in , Facebook etc , choose to have my email ids remembered. Thankfully I have yet not mustered the courage to save my passwords too! Almost always I get annoyed at myself when I clear my cache or Temp files, because that deletes all my settings.

What is all this about? Personalization- it sums up in one word. Almost every site I visit, I choose to personalize.This is not only, because I have lesser user ids to remember, but sometimes the look and feel of websites makes me feel sick.I mean , they actually do. When I joined Rutgers, and was told about myRutgers.edu, I told the classmate sitting next to me that ,"I have to change this skin and theme else I cant focus on the lecture about navigating the site further".Fortunately the instructor did allow us few minutes to get acquainted with the MyRutgers portal.I made good use of this time, by changing the colors and theme to suit my taste( keep me from getting sick).

How much personalization is good? I usually have my local weather, local news(and yes horoscope too!) .However; am I making it easier for Phishers? Almost always on my Yahoo email I notice an ad banner which reflects very accurately my taste of online shopping and this makes me nail bitingly nervous , but then the debate continues...Yahoo is safe etc etc.. and I continue to personalize...