One day I came to the realization that RSS feeds and checking multiple web sites throughout the day can be overwhelming, especially if you are trying to see what the other side is saying.  After all, it's much easier to read and digest posts, news, and information that agree with my perspective/opinion, but it's a lot harder to read the stuff that raises my blood pressure.

Having given it some thought, I didn't want to be jumping back and forth through a whole bunch of RSS feeds, and I also wanted to force myself to be exposed to what the other side is writing about, so I decided to create a little experiment.  Some of you may have already checked out my web site, hipolitical.com, which is an attempt to provide a one-stop shop where I can quickly get an idea of what both sides are saying.

If your are like me (an avid consumer of information) you probably read many blogs and follow several news sites every day.

Since I cannot spend several hours a day reading blogs and news, I subscribe to RSS feeds and use a feed reader (I use Google Reader nowadays). This way I can browse titles and brief descriptions and read only posts that interest me and important breaking news.

DKos is one of my favorites sites and I follow it almost religiously  (follow me under the fold)

Originally published at TechPresident.com

Almost all of the 2008 presidential candidates post news in some form on their web sites, whether they are press releases or collected news articles.  Many candidates now also post speeches and host blogs on their site.  The goal of all of these things is to give you the potential supporter, activist, blogger, or political reporter more information about that candidate's position on the issues, inform you of events, or communicate campaign news.

So how does RSS help take a candidate's information distribution machine to the next level? Let's talk about some of our primary information consumers and how RSS can benefit them.

Consider this a useful place to discuss managing whatever blogs you read.

I currently have over 1000 subscriptions in my RSS reader and I haven't found a good RSS reader to manage all of those.  I'm currently thinking of splitting my feeds between two readers, possibly a politics/non-politics division because most readers seem to get bogged down dealing with large numbers of feeds.

I've been sorta out of touch for a bit, but the daily tag runs have been working fine, and thanks to those few interested in tag cleanup, it looks like tag cleanup has been proceeding apace. Way to go, guys. I've been working with the existing tag data (thanks, ct) and am close to a system that I think will work quite well, but am not ready to write anything up yet, pending one more round of data analysis.

But that's not what I want talk about. I've started using Google Reader as my RSS app, and, as much as I like Safari, it looks like Firefox is just much better at handling Google Reader. So I'm transferring all my stuff from Safari to Firefox, and found that Firefox let's you create search plugins, so that in the search bar up in the right hand corner you can specify whatever site you want. Cool.

So I've created a dKosopedia search plugin, available at either this dKosopedia site, or at this Mozilla site. Give it a try and let me know what you think. (After installing, I had to exit and restart Firefox. I don't know if this is expected behavior.)

Podcasting is a relatively new technology that enables users to quickly and easily download multimedia files, including audio and video, for playback on mobile devices including iPods and other MP3 players, as well as cell phones.

I am sure that most if not all of you either own or have easy access to a computer. I am also sure that any computer available in 2006 has a microphone incorporated, as well as the processing and memory capacity to record plenty of audio. If one prefers an external microphone, they are also pretty easy to get and fairly inexpensive. There are in addition free software programs to record and edit audio, and to convert it into an mp3 file. A few websites offer free storage of media files and easy download by anyone interested in listening or viewing them. Learning a little bit about RSS, although not indispensable, completes the list of ingredients that will allow anyone to start podcasting.

So, why aren't you podcasting? (...follow me under the fold)

Anyone know how to do this easily? I wanted to convert the html used for the links for Koufax candidates for Blogs Most Deserving of Wider Recognition into OPML, and then load them into my bloglines account, but I just spent an hour working on it and am not getting good results when uploading. I'm sure it is my cobbled together OPML file with hamhanded copy and replace efforts. I figured the OPML could also be made available for anyone else who wants to import these blogs into their RSS reader. Any help out there? I'm looking for something easy on my fingers...

I've noticed for some time that the RSS links for individual diarists are broken -- they just lead to a FeedBurner error page saying "This feed is making a 'clunking' sound. This publisher's content was recently unavailable so FeedBurner cannot present it at this time." After a month or so of periodically checking to see if the problem had been fixed, I finally read the fine print on FeedBurner's error message: "Detail: There was a problem retrieving the feed: Error getting URL: 404 - Parameter required".

I looked at the feed URL, and sure enough, the user name parameter wasn't labeled as such:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/dailykos/user?Armando

So I tried adding a label:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/dailykos/user?user=Armando

And bingo! A valid feed!

Could somebody please make this change to the template for the diaries page so that it generates valid URLs!

Chew it up. Spit it out.

Update: Some random links I wanted to blog and never got around to doing it.

• DavidNYC blogs the new SUSA numbers on the California ballot propositions, which show bad news for Arnold's foes (i.e. us). "Alliance for a Better California" has more.

• Robert Bork hates Bush and hates Miers.

With a single stroke--the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals.

• Yglesias makes a good point.

What happened to all the media hecklers? You know the ones. The ones slamming the Democrats for "irresponsibly" refusing to negotiate with Bush unless he took privatization off the table. That was, supposedy, irresponsible because of the looming crisis. Well, if it ever existed it's got to still be looming. So isn't it irresponsible of the administration to have suddenly dropped the topic?

It's sad that things are a "crisis" only so long as the president claims it's a crisis. And the media is only too happy to play along.

• Steve Rubel has some great RSS tips, for those of you who use RSS to control the mass of information on the web.