Long time no see. Or in this case, no write. Things have gotten really busy over the last few weeks, and vacationing in Germany and Switzerland has taken another bite out of my limited time. Which is exactly why you should start using a newsreader.

“Why’s that?”, you ask. Well, in a nutshell, a newsreader is a piece of free software just like your web browser. After you install it on your computer, you can bookmark all your favorite web sites, blogs etc, and the software will watch out for new content. Should the bookmarked website have new material posted, then your newsreader will display a short synopsis of the article, along with a direct link to the material.

As Ben Hammersley of The Guardian points out in a recent article, newsreaders are “awesomely useful. You don’t get the pictures, the layout or the advertising of the real version, but the meaty bits are there for the chewing. And this means you can grab the contents of 100 sites in one bite, and taste exactly what’s new. Your morning is no longer spent trawling your bookmarks for interesting stuff, your phone bill is lower, and you can feel smug in the cutting-edginess of it. Is there anything better for an Online reader such as yourself?”

Hammersley couldn’t be more right. If you’re not already hooked, then at least you might have seen these little orange buttons that have cropped up all across the internet. Whenever you see one, than you know that you can simply click on the button, save the link in your newsreader’s list and start to enjoy news delivered right to your desktop…

Check here if want to know more about RSS (short for Real Simple Syndication), or where to download the free newsreaders (I prefer the free NetNewsWire Lite for Mac OS X, which comes preloaded with gazillion of categories). And hey, this brings me full circle: This blog, Uli’s Lost & Found now supports RSS feeds, so that you can always stay up-to-date with new content.

Update July 2005: Upon migrating content to the WordPress platform, RSS is handled through
http://iserloh.com/feed/

Regular readers of Derek Lowe’s blog over at Corante.com will have seen his recent post on Weinberg’s “Golden Lessons”. Derek talks about a recent article by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in Nature, an article that offers some really thoughful advice…

• No one knows everything, and you don’t have to.
• Aim for rough water.
• Forgive yourself for wasting time.
• Learn something about the history of science.

This short list doesn’t do justice to the article, so start out by reading Derek’s commentary…