RSS Nirvana: What’s the Perfect Number?
If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly battling information overload and time crunch crises. RSS is a simply amazing way to automatically pull stories and information to you without needing to go out and find it each day.
However, I realized recently that I felt a bit buried by the number of feeds that I had to dig through. I must admit that I had been swayed by tech-geek boasts of reading thousands of feeds everyday (how do people do this – are they speed blog readers?). Here I was, with a little over a hundred feeds, and I felt overwhelmed to keep my unread items under 1,000 or 2,000 posts.
I decided I needed to give myself an RSS intervention and trim things down a bit. Over the last week or so, I pruned down to around the 50 mark and now feel a lot happier about firing up Bloglines (I know that many people think that Google Reader is much better, and I may well switch over at some point), my RSS reader.
The key is to try to find the right mix that meets your needs. For me, I realized that I could still get a great take on breaking and interesting stories bubbling out of the mainstream media and the blogosphere by being strategic with RSS. For example, if you read TechCrunch and Mashable “cover to cover” you get a pretty darned good feel for what’s going on in web 2.0, new web products, start ups, and web communities. I then rely on some of my old time faves such as Mathew Ingram and Tony Hung for entertaining and original analysis of all things webby. I also enjoy doing “surgical strikes” into the bowels (so to speak!) of enormous online media sources to pull out information that I’m interested in. For example, BBC News has a great technology feed, and I find a lot of useful fodder for OMC stories from Reuter’s Internet News feed.
Of course, there are times when I want to dive in deeper to find stories from new voices and perspectives, or to simply get a sense of what’s going on in the great galactic sea of the blogosphere and the wider Internets. Robert Scoble, as voracious an RSS reader as they come, offers a feed that displays shared items from his own Google Reader. Therefore, I always have a few hundred stories to peruse that have already been filtered by someone who has dug through thousands of feeds already!
Finally, you need to leave room for the fun stuff. TV Squad is my quick fix of television news and reviews, Valleywag is a fun burst of techie gossip, and I was finally – after about two full years of trying – able to successfully add Mike Lupica’s (just about the best sports writer in the country) New York Daily News column.
How do y’all deploy your RSS feeds?
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July 7th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
for a great web 2.0 overview, I use one site,
http://web20.originalsignal.com/
basically, it’s all rss feeds, easy to read. it show me new headlines in bold, too.
July 7th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Thanks Joe, that gives a really nice overview of some of the best tech blogs out there.
July 7th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
I’m unsophisticated… I don’t use feeds. I wander around using memory, favourites and different maps and links, like I like to wander around strange cities. RSS feeds, to me, are like shopping malls… maybe I miss out on stuff…
maybe it would be easier, but from what you’ve said, the temptation is to buy more than you need.
July 8th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
HH - You may well be right! RSS is simply (really simply, you might say) a tool. If browsing faves from memory or using bookmarks works for you, then power to you!
And thanks for having OMC on your mind!
July 8th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Hehe, no probs… it’s on my map.
July 8th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Outstanding !
July 10th, 2007 at 1:39 am
It is true that information is pouring faster and faster. To deal with this challenge one can use a) software that extracts and summarizes the essential facts and b) software that visualizes the text information (like MindManager).
One can also combine automatic text summarization with visualization. In the past few years I have been working on both aspects. For anyone who would like to get their web pages and Google searches instantly summarized I can point to Context Organizer (http://www.contextdiscovery.com).
Another improvement can be to apply scripts that summarize large number of search results and report to the user. This way the user takes advantage of a summarizing robot that spiders large number of pages and extracts only the topics that are of interest to the user.
Large amount of information is a good thing providing that we have more practical ways to take advantage of it.
Best regards,
Henry
July 11th, 2007 at 12:22 am
That sounds like a great tool, Henry, thanks! And I agree that more information is good, and getting help in managing it and getting to the good stuff is very good
July 15th, 2007 at 11:32 am
I like high heels message, go out and fine it yourself,
unless you are sure a particular rss will give you everything you need.
July 15th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Travis, I think you’ve hit on one of the reasons that RSS hasn’t hit the massive adoption rates that some might have predicted would have come to pass by now. Everyone’s browsing habits are a little bit different. I enjoy finding sources for information and opinion and “locking in” that I can access new stuff anytime I want via RSS. So for me, once I went RSS, I never looked back. But I totally get that for others, bookmarks, memory, or simply browsing the net organically is the way to do it.