Friday October 20, 2006

GRAZR - a tool for organizing feeds and more.

Grazr, http://grazr.com, is a tool that seems both interesting and potential useful. I found it when looking for information on OPML files, which are ways of creating sets of RSS feeds. ResearchBuzz has a review as do many other sites. I started thinking about this after seeing discussions about using RSS for TOCs for researchers. Subscribe to several of these, or in different subject areas, and things could get messy fast in most feedreaders.

I have to admit that the number of blogs I subscribe to can be counted on both hands and the number I actually read on any kind of regular basis on one hand, but for people who subscribe to a lot, this could be useful. I bookmark frequently and fairly indiscriminately because it is so trivial to do so (a keystroke for all intents and purposes). If blogs, social network stuff, YouTube channels, mashups, and podcasts, all of which Grazr handles, were one keystroke things (and if I had oodles more time to actually view, read, participate, listen, etc.), then I think this tool would be pretty useful. Or it might end up like a fancy version of my bookmarks lists: dozens of things of which I have no idea why I actually have them there and only a handful that actually are useful much less used.

I'm just curious - for those reading this, do you subsribe to lots of blogs? Or channels, podcasts, etc? I have no idea what sort of norm, if any, yet, exists for these numbers (and those norms for particular segments of the population too). Are you good about organizing your bookmarks? If so, maybe Grazr is for you. Finally, anyone know of a library doing something with this? Or like this?