By far the most interesting little app that I’ve had the pleasure of working with is Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire, a handy-dandy and surprisingly powerful RSS reader for OS X. I’ve written about the “lite” version before; the full-on, paid-for ($39.95) version allows you to organize, using three window panes, all the blogs, news feeds, and miscellaneous literary garbage that you want to read.
It even allows one to post to one’s own weblog. Kottke writes about RSS brilliantly but the way I think about RSS is that it’s a way of consolidating what people, companies, communities, and organizations write online without the intermediary. It’s the ultimate act of disintermediation, that poorly scripted term of the late 1990s as captured by folks like Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster in Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transform Strategy. But RSS (or what I also call “browserless surfing”) is to everyone’s (within the information economy) benefit.