Feed reading: filtering and delegation
09.10.07A few days after writing the post "10 ways to make remembering to read your feeds easier", a couple of other thoughts have come to mind that I wanted to share in a new post as well.
First, filtering your feeds can further increase the signal to noise ratio and make feed reading more rewarding - thus easier to come back to regularly. Online services like FeedDigest and FeedRinse can be used to filter (and/or combine) feeds before they hit your reader and most feed readers offer "smart filters" that essentially search inside your feeds to display a limited subset of new items based on the presence of keywords.
Second, and this is important though it sometimes slips my mind, it does need to be acknowledged that reading feeds takes time. It takes far less time than checking all the subscribed sites manually for new content and you'll be kept up to date far better using RSS - but it still takes time. Organizations with enough staff may want to designate one person as ultimately responsible for reading feeds most closely and finding the gems for everyone else. Those gems can be shared using a tag in del.icio.us or by email. This may be particularly important for organizations seeking to create content based on the feeds they read. Everyone should read feeds, but if someone who is already too busy is ultimately responsible for daily, close feed reading and content creation - then it's too likely to fall by the wayside.
For more information and discussion on reading feeds, check out 10 ways to make remembering to read your feeds easier.
September 10th, 2007 at
There it is. It’s a lot easier to stay on top of feeds that are [at least] partially pruned.
September 13th, 2007 at
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September 13th, 2007 at
Marshall, I’ve been following your rss productivity meme — great tips! You should get an award for wrangling 3,000+ feeds. I am sure somewhere out there, there’s a competition.
Anyway, I agree with you completely. As more and more information becomes available in the RSS channel, the better (there are some cool apps out there that are RSS-ifying tools like SalesForce, Oracle, etc). But it also starts to feel like drinking from a fire hose! The key is finding a way to subscribe to all the information you could potentially need, and then have filtering in place that makes sure you catch what you need to.
There are a few approaches to this filtering process: keyword driven, social popularity (what articles have the most diggs), or personal habits (what feeds do you read the most, versus delete/ignore).
I’m sure you’re familiar with local software company Attensa (yeah PDX!), that’s pursuing the later method with what they’ve dubbed “AttentionStream” technology — essentially tracking your reading behavior and prioritizing your river of news by what feeds and posts you read most. Things you pay more attention to bubble up to the top of the river. There is also the option to manually influence a feed’s priority by dragging it up or down on your overall subscription list.
And, just last week, they rolled out rss readers for the Mac and Windows (stand-alone, before it was Outlook only). A great thing about this is that you can sync them centrally online, so that if you use a PC at work and a Mac at home, you’ll see the same view.