NetNewsWire Strawpoll...
Inspired by a terrifying conversation with Dan Hon in which he revealed that he had 135 subscriptions strapped to his groaning copy of NetNewsWire, I decided to do a bit of a straw-poll. Not enough people were available online for me to do it properly though, and I'd had quite a lot of caffeine so I got quite impatient, so here are some unsubstantiated rumours glued together with some implausible guff
Spies situated on the shiny pinacle of nearby Trump Towers have spotted Meg Hourihan striding through "The Internet" with roughly thirty subscriptions in NetNewsWire yapping after her like tiny dalmation puppies. But our insiders think that more is going on here than meets they eye... Could she be reading many more sites via bookmarks?
The mysterious shadowy figure of Anil Dash is said - shockingly - to have rejected the one true church of NetNewsWire and to have narry a subscription at all. Indeed, he's recently seen cavorting with old-style "browsers" in a down-town speakeasy filled with cookies and bookmarks.
Your humble editor can only confess to around forty subscriptions - several of which are also not strictly 'read' as such, while several other people... {blah blah blah... time passes} ... with a stoat where the sun don't shine. But enough about that particular mystery weblogger...
Back to the issue at hand, the quest for the Ultimate Subscriptions Champion was proceeding apace. Throughout my investigations, the great mythical moon monster of Captain "Zeitgeist" Doctorow kept cropping up. Could this silver surfer of the cyberspaceways be an RSS man-mountain? One of our sources claimed he had in his secret underground lair a massive installation of NetNewsWire linked by thick fibrous cables to three hundred or even more subscriptions, each of which would be downloaded freshly each day! Such dastardly decadence! Sadly, the truth is a little more prosaic - after e-mail contact, Cory has confirmed that he's only attached to around 120/130 sites... Our winner therefore remains - undefeated - Dan "Bandwidth" Hon - whose every crippling refresh breaks the very fibre of the internet underfoot. All hail him, for he is the geek of all geeks...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Updates from the masses! Cory writes in to compensate for his NetNewsWire inadequacy by claiming that he has i) a couple of hundred sites that are set to poll once a week using pineapple and ii) an hourly e-mail from infominder looking for updates on another 100 sites as well... Possibly, though, he's just trying to look cool in front of Ben Hammersley who declares Dan Hon to be "a girl" - citing his own concurrent two hundred and twelve subscriptions...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 28, 2003 10:25 AM
Brent Simmons has 147 subscriptions according to his interview with MacSlash.
→ Posted by: Tom Bridge at March 28, 2003 2:40 PM
I'm at 165 currently, this includes some dozens of news sites where I usually read only the headlines. I wish NetNewsWire had some built-in system to help me track which subscriptions should be dropped, but I've been unable to come up with suggestions that don't raise immediate objections...
→ Posted by: Rainer Brockerhoff at March 28, 2003 4:44 PM
I have exactly 50 subscriptions at the moment. Pretty lightweight compared to you people.
→ Posted by: Andy Baio at March 28, 2003 5:01 PM
I have 57 weblogs in my Syndirella aggregator, which I use only occasionally. I still read many sites that don't provide RSS feeds (i.e. Diaryland and Pitas users), so at this point the news reader just isn't an ideal solution to reading websites. Still waiting for a better alternative.
→ Posted by: Bill at March 28, 2003 6:17 PM
106 and climbing ...
→ Posted by: George at April 6, 2003 5:02 AM