Cross-posted to Athletics Nation...

Forget about the 5th starter battle. The most drama around this year's Spring Training has been the emergence of Travis Buck. With his wild Swisher-esque hair and a Wade Boggs/Tony Gwynn-like .366 average, while leading the team with 6 doubles, Buck is taking Phoenix Municipal by storm. Hold on tight, and get ready for Buck Mania!


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Don't get me wrong, RSS is a fantastic way for me to keep tabs on all the news and all the blogs rapidly, in one place. But the technology is in itself passive, and I keep finding myself missing out on the full picture, as the RSS reader (Google Reader in my case) scrapes the feed, but doesn't give me some very important elements to the blogosphere, including context, community, comments, and presentation. In effect, I am losing my participatory role in the blogosphere, making it less of a conversation, and instead, much more passive.

As I push through the 500 or so articles a day, if I stay in the RSS reader mode, I don't get an indication as to who is commenting on what articles, from any of my 100 or so feeds I follow. Even those feeds that list the total raw number of comments don't speak to who is commenting and the tone of the discussion, and there is no way to see without visiting the site directly.

Instead of adding to the conversation myself, I'm hitting "Add to Shared Items" for my link blog and moving on, not commenting and not alerting site owners and content generators that I'd been by. To those site owners who generate the RSS feeds themselves, I'm a mere number in their Feedburner statistics. I don't show up in their page views, my name doesn't show up in the comments, and I may as well be invisible. And as Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's "Naked Conversations" and other new media books will tell you, often, the comments are more interesting than the original post itself. Blogs are for community, not for a pulpit.

Given I don't have the time to control-click each of the URLs to see them in their own right, to see if the comments and those commenting will encourage my being involved in the conversation, how do I break through the RSS barrier? I don't see that the RSS standard is going to be enhanced such that comments are optionally displayed for each feed, so I should be much more diligent to selectively pursue conversations with top bloggers and top conversations. Otherwise, I've cut myself off from the blogosphere.

Intuit's TurboTax is a life saver. Every year around this time, and often earlier, my wife and I take all the last year's financial papers, sort them and then push them through the TurboTax program online, counting income statements and then (crossing our fingers), hoping we have enough deductions so that the government finds itself needing to send us a quick check and thank us for our efforts.

Every year, it seems to get just a bit easier. TurboTax stores our prior year's data, and imports it so I don't have to go through the mundane tasks of telling it where I live, where I work, what my name is, etc. It assumes nothing has changed from the previous year, and gives me the option to update. Additionally, the ability to import my brokerage account data from eTrade is dramatically easier than saving the data into Excel or Quicken or some other tool, then going one by one to add my gains and subtract my losses. (Funny how all year I root for gains, and come tax time, I root for losses...)

This year's efforts took the better part of the afternoon. I had two piles - the "To Do" and the "Done" piles, and I methodically moved from one to the next, with the A's spring training game playing on the radio in the background. By mid-afternoon, we were all done for yet another year, and can store away our papers until the IRS comes calling later to see if we got it all right. But that hasn't happened yet, and we've relied solely on the Web version of TurboTax for more than 5 years. I can't imagine going any other way.

Now, in the next few weeks, I expect an e-mail to confirm everything went through, and a quick bump in the bank as the refund goes through via direct deposit. It just works!

It seems we have moved beyond the point of having all data in one master location, but data is being prioritized such that some pieces are backed up in 3 to 4 places simultaneously, while other data is not backed up at all.

Last night this became especially apparent with our setup of the brand-new Apple TV. At initial setup, the Apple TV synchronizes with a selected iTunes library, and effectively backs up the entire song and TV show collection to its 40 Gigabyte hard drive, assuming it fits. Over my 802.11g network (my PowerBook is not yet n-enabled), this can clearly take a considerable amount of time. In fact, while thousands of songs and my TV shows have been synched so far, my iTunes progress bar tells me we have a few thousand more to go before the first full synch is complete. Additionally, if the Apple TV is seen as "busy", showing media, the synchronization stops. This means to offer the ideal setup for syncing, I should keep the laptop open and not use the Apple TV for a bit.


The Apple TV synchronization, in progress

Meanwhile, as this has been going on, Apple's Backup service (from .Mac) asked me this morning if I wanted to complete my daily backup of personal files and data, consisting of Safari bookmarks, e-mail, documents in my Documents folder and more. As I approved that backup, I also noticed that at the same time, my iSync icon in the menu bar began to rotate, indicating that my Address Book, iCal appointments and Safari bookmarks were being synchronized, so I would have the same data with me at the office.

This got me thinking - are we so far beyond the point of having all my data in one insecure location that I need so many pieces of it backed up every which way? My iTunes media is now on the home laptop, the AppleTV hard drive and my iPod, while my address book and iCal data is on my home laptop, work desktop and via the Web, as well as on the iPod. Clearly, over time I've prioritized some data over other data, backing up some pieces 3-4 times, and others not at all. Apple's recent bias, given the company's focus over the last few years, is to save my purchased music and video, even if my professional life didn't depend on it. But to see my data flowing three ways, to iSync, to .Mac Backup and to the AppleTV, all at once, was an eye opener.