Tech Blog

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RSS is awesome.  It's a way to automatically be notified when a website gets an update.  To use RSS you subscribe to a feed and you can monitor your feed with something like Google's Feed Reader .

I've been using it to manage my online news feeds for my pop culture radio show and technology writing for years.  Yet I'm still surrounded by colleagues who have a list of favourite bookmarks of websites they visit everyday, hunting and pecking for the latest updates and clicking through pages of stories.

Using a reader lets you see the headline or opening sentences in a quick glance.  I can read hundreds of stories in seconds scanning for interesting headlines the way we browse magazines and newspapers.  RSS has made news consumption easy.

But it didn't really catch on save for a passionate niche community.

Facebook , really, is RSS that people get.  They like a friend (subscribe to their feed) and then get updates automatically delivered to them instead of poking around to sites (like feed reader).

The PVR is another form of RSS that has gone mainstream the way the web didn't.

Blake Carter is a 25 year old Calgarian who is proud to say she only watches shows on her PVR .  She's become so used to controlling her content consumption, she'll watch something she doesn't like for 15 minutes to let her PVR catch up to the 'real show' so she can fast forward commercials.

She records everything from HBO shows to reality shows to Say Yes To The Dress .  "I never don't have anything to watch," she says.  "I always have something good on my PVR."

She's not the only one, last week more Americans watched Entourage off their digital recorder than saw it live.

We've had the ability to record shows from tv for more than three decades, but the ease at which the PVR lets you subscribe to shows to consume on your own schedule (the same way an RSS Feed Reader lets you consumer web subscriptions) is just too strong to ignore.

I like to stack my PVR with numerous episodes of shows like Weeds or Dexter only to sit down and have a date night with my wife and knock out 3 or 4 installments on our own "marathon."

If you're a PVR fan in Canada, you're in the minority.  Only 20% of Canadians have a PVR .  Is it another RSS situation where a great tool exists that people don't understand?  More likely it's a later adoption of the technology to Canada. TiVo has been in the States for years and PVRs are new to Canadian cable subscribers.

Once you get one, you get it and the numbers won't stay small for long.

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