We Are Becoming Digital Pack Rats 

"Personal computers -- our jukeboxes, photo labs, accountants and film studios -- are becoming the proverbial junk drawer, scattered with scads of must-have information. Sister devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players and digital video recorders overflow with often barely a bite of spare storage.

The ravenous nature of society coupled with the quest for convenience has spawned a nation of digital pack rats, eager to possess every gigabyte of media they can download, and too greedy -- or lazy -- to let it go....

One's desk might be clean and tidy, but countless computer desktops have become chaotic.

'It's like an infinite attic, and we're filling it,' said Peter Lyman, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems. 'People are feeling overwhelmed and trying to find coping strategies.' " [The Indianapolis Star, via Library Link of the Day]

Heh - good timing! I just wrote about the rise of the personal server as part of my "Product Pipeline" column for the next issue of netConnect. The day after I turned it in, I bought a 1GB SD card for my Treo because I can't carry around enough ones and zeroes on my current 512MB version. Storage storage everywhere, and not a drop to drink! I paid a little under $100 for the new card, a Gigabyte of portable storage the size of a postage stamp! Next year, terabytes will be affordable.

To quote Roy Tennant, "Storage is officially cheaper than dirt."

The RSS Weblog has two interesting posts today that I won't go into too much detail about since no one but me can read what I'm posting (if a blogger blogs in the woods and there's no one around to read it, is it still blogging?...).

• An Open Discussion of Feed-Reading Habits
  "Web designer D. Keith Robinson asks his reader how they consume RSS — full text or summary,  do they mind ads in feeds, and the obligatory 'what reader do you use?' "
   
• RSS Would Be Perfect If...
  "Me? I love RSS. I couldn’t keep up with the embarrassingly small percentage of WIN sites I read if I didn’t have FeedDemon, but there are a few things I wish RSS and feed readers could do."

Interesting questions and thoughts proposed in both pieces, which run parallel to something I've been thinking about - the different types of RSS readers (human, not machine). Thinking about it in the car this morning, I came up with four distinct types of RSS users that I know of (in no particular order):

1. The Anal Information Junkie -  reads looks at every post and gets the shakes when she can't goes too long without her aggregator (I'm in this category)
2. The Trend Spotter - scans for patterns and digs deeper when a specific topic starts percolating (I think Bernie Goldbach is in this category)
3. The RSS Pack Rat - keeps an archive of selected feeds that can be searched when the pack rat wants to research a topic (I think Phil Wolff is in this category, but there are similarities to the Trend Spotter)
4. The Casual Causal RSS Reader - someone who has a reader (or an account for one somewhere) and has subscriptions, but only reads them when she has time, which is rare, so it normally takes an out-of-the-ordinary event to get the user back to the reader (I know a couple of people at my office that I think fall into this category because they don't have time to read their Bloglines accounts regularly, until something forces them to)

What RSS profiles have I missed? Which one are you? How does a #4 get to a #1? Is one of the great things about RSS that it works well for all of these types?