My new favourite t-shit, care of McSweeney’s:

Web syndication is great. Instead of monitoring a publisher’s site for new updates, you can have something do the monitoring for you. Even better still, then something new comes along, well, it’ll let you know.

These systems tend to work best for publishers who update sporadically, yet where nonetheless, these updates are important; and for high throughput publishers, where utilizing a centralized feed reader can keep track of what you’ve read and what you haven’t. (It’s not quite as effective for ultra-high frequency sites, like FFFFOUND!, where you really don’t have much hope of looking at everything.)

An example of the former–infrequent yet important updates–are academic conference websites. Instead of trolling these sites for new information about paper submission guidelines or student volunteer sign ups (how many people have received the “SV Sign Up Now Available” email, only to discover that sign up has been opened for only a few hours and you’re number 241 on the waiting list), it would be far more productive to sign up to RSS feed and let those updates come to you.