Feasting On An RSS Diet

As I sift through my RSS feeds every morning, I rarely find myself savoring what I see in my clogged inbox. When one has to race through 1,000 items, coughed up by 43 subscriptions, as I do, there is very little time for anything besides catching one’s breath.

On a day, I'd liked what I saw, I'd made this e-card. 

When first out, RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, provided an easy way for making media content more portable. They still do. But what's changed, in the meanwhile, however, is the volume of that output. Where it once used to be a manageable stream, now, it's a formidable deluge that's very hard to keep pace with. And each time one glides from one tab to the next to check on the newest RSS entry, it corrodes one's concentration.  

A new study, published in Science this week, imaged human brains and watched them try to multitask as subjects performed a set of variously interrupted tasks. They saw that our brains can divide resources fairly easily for two tasks, but have a much harder time juggling three or more. 

That being the case, there is no such thing as efficient multitasking. But, regardless of the impact of the feeds on the reader's ability to focus, high-traffic media outlets stand to gain from them by asking advertisers to sponsor their RSS feeds. In return, they get a "short sponsorship post," which will reach subscribers.

(Via Ars Technica)