Planner Reads

Less than a week ago Alltop launched its Personalized Feed Reader. Alltop is an online magazine rack that aggregates RSS feeds of every major topic from wine to personal finance and everything in between. It saves a reader from having to identify and add RSS feeds to a personalized Google page. All the best feeds on a given topic are easily scannable and can now be added to a customized page with a single click. Alltop is a simple, useful service for those who don’t care to spend time creating RSS feeds and customizing them.

But Alltop has been bashed in the technology community. And in my opinion this bashing represents the worst of the technology community. This can be summed up in one phrase – technological determinism. I feel that many of the digerati and even folks in the social media space suffer from a technological determinism bias ( I do too at times).

Technological determinism’s doctrine is based on the premise that a society’s technology determines its cultural values, social structure or history. It is the belief that technology is good for humanity and that it shapes humanity for the better. Got a problem – solve ...