If, like me, you are trying to live “off-grid” from FaceBook and/or LiveJournal, one good option is a feed-reader.

These subversive software tools are supported by most major silo websites and (to varying extents) permit you to download huge gobs of data for later perusal, online and/or offline.

The silos don’t like them because there is reduced opportunity to advertise things to you when you’re offline.

I’ve set up my feedreaders (NetNewsWire on Mac, Liferea on Ubuntu) to suck-down my Facebook feeds, and will be setting it up for my few remaining Livejournal friends in a moment.

Kudos to JWZ for the info.

I don’t use GoogleReader at the moment, ever since it went “social” so that one inadvertent click could end up sharing whatever you’re looking at with gazillions of people; that’s an invitation for disaster if ever I’ve heard one – there are people “following” me, and people I am “sharing” with, and I have no idea if those two mean the same thing.

Welcome to the future, folks – after “cloud computing” will come “managable computing” – or perhaps “local, sustainable computing” – featuring “asocial software” like feed-readers and mines. As Mathias Baert’s (CORRECTION: Adriana Lukas’) tag line for #themineproject has it: If you wanna be social, go somewhere else.

The obvious joke about not using CPU cycles sourced from third-world sweatshops, I’ll leave for you to ponder for yourselves. 🙂