In my humble opinion, the single biggest problem with the Internet today is the sheer volume of all the great information available. It can be quite difficult to find the precise knowledge that you're looking for. Talk about the proverbial needle in a haystack. Whoa! Excessive stimulus is a real issue. You wanted to read some opinions from music buffs about a particular genre of music, and every other blog article dealt with new punk clothing fads and which bands have the most outrageous hairdos. How can we find only the content we're looking for without getting mired in extraneous information that eats up both time and patience?



The answer is in context. There is now a way to filter through the dissonance of gibberish and intelligence to find precisely what you're looking for. Instead of having to join clubs and organizations and receive their newsletters via email (at their convenience) you can now have control over what you accept. Having to search through millions of blogs to find the few you like has now become an outmoded task. The new system is called an RSS Reader: 'Rich site summary' or 'really simple syndication' are the common definitions of this software. The process begins by signing up to receive automatic updates from blogs and other Web sites that distribute summaries of their latest postings to your reader. You then find which ones you like and eliminate the rest. You can keep adding new sites until you have literally hundreds of informative connections in your areas of precise interest.

Another great characteristic of the RSS Reader program is the fact that you can put in key words of interest and the computer will surf the Web for you and add new blogs and web sites to your list, rating them according to the terms you have selected. You then scan over these and add the ones you feel are pertinent, deleting the duds. Ultimately you will have an email-style formatted file where you can search through all your favorite writers, news, and topics' latest information. Then you also have capabilities such as 'comment' so you can automatically share your contribution with your fellow humans. Or, you can reply to the 'messages' and actually communicate with the creators of the ideas.

This will really help to distribute the information sharing processes of the current top-down mass communication systems like the media. We can obtain numerous opinions on an issue and give our own views, instead of being told one story that is heavily influenced by the company's biased perspective of the situation.

So, you can see this has the potential to be something quite huge. Less time wasted finding all the information you're looking for, and sharing your opinion and meeting others similar to yourself has never been so easy. The RSS Reader is ripping away all the useless wrapping paper, revealing the true content of the gift of the Internet.