I simply separate my RSS feeds into two folders - A list and B list. A list is for independent writers who only post a couple times a day. B list is for news-centric websites. I do not hesitate to simply mark the entire B list as read.
Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#32I simply separate my RSS feeds into two folders - A list and B list. A list is for independent writers who only post a couple times a day. B list is for news-centric websites. I do not hesitate to simply mark the entire B list as read.
I second this. Triageing feeds is the way to go. Also don't think you can read it all.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#33Enter PostRank: http://www.postrank.com/feed/ For every RSS feed you will get 4 RSS sub-feeds: 1. Best posts. 2. Great posts. 3. Good posts. 4. All posts. The ranking (to decide if a post is good/great/best) is done through its popularity online (reddit, digg, delicious, etc.). When I'm interested in a website I usually subscribe to the best posts sub-feed, sometimes to the great posts sub-feed. This way I'm never ov…
There's also the reader extension http://labs.postrank.com/gr
You can set the treshold, and it will dim out the items that are below it. It greatly increases your ability to "fly through" items, without worrying too much about what you're missing.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#34The current model of RSS consumption is still broken. For the vast majority of news sources, you really care about headlines and recency rather than read/unread counts. I had a rambling blog post about it a few years ago: http://bit.ly/rklROK
My first startup was trying to address some of these issues but we never quite got there. Unfortunately, innovation in the RSS space pretty much stopped (partially because of the adequate, and free, google reader). I keep waiting for someone to pick up the news source / skimming / river of news / feed magazine torch but I haven't seen it yet.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#35I don't think RSS as a mechanism is the problem here. If anything, it's a problem of oversubscribing to too many blogs and news sites. What's really needed is a better mechanism for providing an overview of these items in a way that allows one to quickly skim over unread items and decide what's worth reading and what's not. Something along the lines of Flipboard or Pulse with ReadItLater support, which already exists…
I use proxies to filter my news. Proxies are people like you and every other user of Reddit and HN. These people help me by voting on what stories they think are important. For example, I never go to TechCrunch on my own. Occasionally there will be an interesting article there, and it will show up on HN. It's using the wisdom of the crowd to filter the thousands of articles that are written every day. Instead of savi…
This is a great idea. But I find that the churn rate for HN is quite high in comparison to reddit, and I need to check HN quite a few times a day to not miss interesting stuff. Also, though this case is probably rare given the shared interests of HN and subreddits, it's still possible that you could miss out on something that you would have potentially found interesting, but the majority did not.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#36I simply separate my RSS feeds into two folders - A list and B list. A list is for independent writers who only post a couple times a day. B list is for news-centric websites. I do not hesitate to simply mark the entire B list as read.
I second this. Triageing feeds is the way to go. Also don't think you can read it all.
I think you're missing his point: he separates his feeds into high- and low-volume, and is willing to triage the high-volume subset without missing out on the rest.
I've been doing something similar for a couple of years now. I built http://readwarp.com to manage my high-volume sites, and now my google reader's dropped from 1500 feeds to 100 low-volume must-see feeds that generate 10 stories a day.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#37"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task." Okay, I call shens on this whole article. Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.…
That's what I was thinking, it sounds like she just replaced RSS with Twitter. She's obviously constantly checking Twitter. Instead of reading twitter all day every day I'd rather just browse my RSS feed in the morning and in the evening. I don't feel like I miss anything either.
Jacqui's job is what it is though. Not everyone has the same obligations that she does.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#38How does sam get what he needs from his twitter stream?
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#39I'm personally torn on RSS readers. Admittedly, I'm an almost entirely unproductive person lately, so I can't claim that it's because RSS is getting in the way of other things. My chief suspicion is that as the number of subscriptions goes up, the propensity to fly through headlines rises as well, and so too does the efficiency of applying whatever criteria normally applies in choosing whether or not to read past a h…
It seems there's a problem that needs to be solved, doesn't it? How's this for a startup idea: "Pandora for RSS"
Users subscribe to a few feeds and provide feedback as to which articles they liked and disliked; the system correlates each individual with other similar users and starts providing suggestions, ratings, and sorts the articles in terms of "quality" that you defined by your votes. Then, as a user, you don't have to read everything - just the best recent posts.
It can be treated more like a tailored/customized version of Reddit or Hacker News. You don't have to "catch up", you just go browse it when you feel like it.
Re: Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this. Triageing feeds is the way to go. Also don't think you can read it all.
I think you're missing his point: he separates his feeds into high- and low-volume, and is willing to triage the high-volume subset without missing out on the rest. I've been doing something similar for a couple of years now. I built http://readwarp.com to manage my high-volume sites, and now my google reader's dropped from 1500 feeds to 100 low-volume must-see feeds that generate 10 stories a day.
Yea, I don't think I did mis-understand the comment, but I glad you found a place to plug your site.