Journal 2 Blog Post: Thoughts on RSS readers and Affinity groups

During this week, I finally joined the infamous twitter community. Just to make things clear, I personally don’t care that much about social media. The only reason I have a Facebook was to have a news feed and to keep in contact with old friends. I also deal with the learning disability known as dyslexia which makes reading more of a chore then a pleasure. This I hope, will give context to my experience with Affinity groups and Feed readers. While I do believe that Affinity groups and Feed readers are useful tools to gather information and people of like minds, from my experience I don’t think it is very good for me. My Dig page, for example, gathers tons of articles but what I found out is it wasn't all that interesting. Most of the information was cursory information about what’s coming out or people’s opinions on a particular topic. When I look for information I tend to search with a more targeted idea in mind. So searching through a Digg feed winds up being slower than me just finding the information by searching. The same thing goes for the Affinity group. Actually the groups would post something actually interesting but that wasn’t because the post itself said something interesting. More like, I was able to draw interest from the subject of the post. For example, I was watching a video from my feeds about a new game coming out and the most interesting thing wasn’t about the game but the new control mechanism they developed to minimize simulation sickness. It wasn’t the post itself or the trailer but my own prior knowledge coloring the way I was viewing it. In short, I don’t see this technology being part of my daily internet routine though.

Virtual Reality News @InsideRealityVR

https://twitter.com/InsideRealityVR?lang=en

Virtual Reality News @VRReports

https://twitter.com/VRReports?lang=en

Q1 How do you follow a # on Twitter?

Turns out the # naming convention is not an officially supported feature in twitter. It was developed by its community in order to search for relevant and related tweets faster. If you actually wanted to follow a tweet, you need to seek the help of a third party software.

Q2 Where and when did affinity groups start?

Apparently affinity groups started formally back in the 16th century with dining clubs in Britain that would meet regularly in the same area. Think of a group of food blogs meeting at a bar every year.