A 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.