I’ve always thought of myself as the early adopter type. Often, the only thing that keeps me from adopting something new and cool is lack of funds — hence, for example, the lack of iPod today.

That said, I feel really late to the RSS party.

Intuitively, I understood the attraction of RSS for some people, but it wasn’t for me. Strapping on a Luddite cloak, I said to myself, “surfing the Web is just a fine way to consume information.”

So I bounced around from blog to blog and site to site and developed methods to improve my efficiency, but now all those little tricks seem like a wooden wagon wheel compared to rocket-fueled RSS.

Last week, I installed FeedDemon.

The Web will never be the same for me again.

Keeping up with my favorite blogs is so easy now, I keep abreast of more of them. And I don’t feel the need to devote large chunks of time to blog reading. Got five minutes? Read a couple of blog entries. FeedDemon helps me keep track of what I’ve read and what I’ve haven’t — like a virtual bookmark.

And here’s my first RSS-related complaint — publishers/bloggers who only provide a the first few hundred words of an article, forcing me to leave FeedDemon to read the entire article — something I find myself doing hardly at all. In fact, in most cases I’ve deleted such publishers’ channels. I would be interested in hearing what others who use an RSS reader think of getting only teasers?

BTW: For those who missed the previous announcement, here’s the new howardowens.com RSS feed.