Is now the time to ditch your RSS feed? Possibly.

That’s what Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng suggests. “RSS was essentially created so that Internet users could stay up-to-date with every single posting made on a particular website,” she writes. “This was, of course, back in the day when every site on earth didn’t post 150 new stories per day, and your friend’s blog feed didn’t contain 60 cross-posted Twitter musings to crowd out the one real post per week.” We’re with her. Despite the fact that we follow a lot of news, keeping up with the grindy nature of an RSS feed is an exercise in force-feeding, and one a lot of people simply don’t have time for. In fact, just 6 percent of Internet users use RSS regularly, and somehow the other 94 percent don’t miss out on too much. We love our RSS readers, but if you choose to follow us on Twitter instead, we totally understand. Because we go months without actually checking into Google Reader, and days without checking into Pulse, because we already caught the important stuff on Twitter already. source

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Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us.
ArsTechnica writer Ken Fisher • About an experiment that his site tried with ad-blocking that appears to have backfired to some degree. Fisher says that while some people white-listed the site, many more complained about it. Apparently, most of their readers are heavy tech users, the very type of people who will turn off ads despite the fact that they pay for the content people read. It’s all the more stark considering it’s something most non-technology companies can’t stop thinking about. source

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Under such conditions, the tide of amateurism cannot but recede until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant.
John Philip Sousa • In a 1906 article titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” making a passionate argument against the use of the player piano and the gramophone. In a way, he was right – people don’t sing kum-bay-ya around the campfire much anymore – but even he admitted his claims rang a little alarmist. Ars Technica has a great article covering the ways that mainstream content creators have freaked out over new technology. Other new ideas scorned? The photocopier, the VCR, home taping, MP3s, DVRs and Digital TV and radio. Amusing read. • source

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The Firefox 3.5 release builds on the browser’s existing strengths to offer a high-quality user experience with a lot of rich new functionality.
Ars Technica writer Ryan Paul • Explaining why Firefox 3.5 is a major step forward for not only the browser itself but the Web in general. Simply put, it doesn’t suck. Less simply put, it offers significant speed increases, private browsing, HTML 5 video standards, drop shadows, interface upgrades and other awesome stuff. But you STILL can’t drag JPG files into Photoshop without a big error box coming up. What the heck, Mozilla? That’s a big problem. • source

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04 Sep 2011 16:42