Four Feeds You Can Feed On

With so much content out there these days attached to RSS feeds, it’s hard to decide which weblogs or pages to which you should subscribe. There are around five thousand feeds in the NewsGator general taxonomy alone, just a drop in the bucket of the billions of RSS feeds now out there available for subscription.

So I’ve just picked four pages that I find enervating, challenging, educational or just a great time waster.

1) Cory Doctorow, author, journalist, public speaker, polymath and technology geek, and his band of friends write about and link to anything and everything they find interesting on Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things. One post might analyze current copyright law, the next discusses a Chinese toy called “Gun of Baseball” and the next a photo of an office design based on the Nautilus submarine from Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Hard to be bored here.

2) Former games writer for the Rocky Mountain News (he was axed in a recent downsizing at the Denver paper), Brian Crecente created Kotaku, a newsworthy and fun place to visit even if (like me) you’re not a gamer. Crecente and crew take a humorous and self-deprecating tone in their approach to video and computer games.

3) Kevin Kelly uses his blog called Street Use to look at the ways people remodel and modify technology, “in short, stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used.” Included are homemade guns, recycled goods (a beer bottle solar water heater), lamps made from wooden clothes hangers and other assorted instances of ingenuity.

4) At Gizmodo, you can watch the amazing rollout of electronic consumer products as they are built, introduced and analyzed and finally bought and sold. Today’s first post was about a Japanese electronic device that measures pet fat. If it’s a gadget, it will pop up here sooner or later.