Week 4: Thing 8

So I think that RSS is probably going to be the most practical technology in this exercise and it's also the one I know the least about. I think there are better RSS readers than the ones they have suggested. I'll ask around and post their links here later.
The new Yahoo! homepage is operating on a similar feature where you can add links to commonly visited pages to your homepage that will then open in a scroll over/pop-up window.
I think, in actuality, that the internet is a shrinking force at this point rather than an expanding one. Just as the argument exists that the universe must reach a point at which it must contract, the same is happening to the internet. There is a centralizing of information on certain websites and rather than "surfing" the web, like in the "early days" of the internet, I find myself visiting the same 4-6 websites over and over again. Features like RSS allow us to quickly visit those websites and see what has updated. If we regularly read the same blogs or visit the same humor websites, we can use RSS to alert us to updates without having to go to the website every day. The same is true of news stories that interest us or that we regularly look at. I'm curious to see how personalized this technology becomes in order to allow it to suit our individual needs.

While the technology doesn't quite exist yet, I think that this could be a useful way to dispense information to students and allow them to read up on current events, view pictures, and even read blogs that are relevant to a particular class. I see this as being technology that could evolve or be adapted in the near future.