RSS Overload Strategies
November 14th, 2004Roland Tanglao has some pointers for dealing with what he calls RSS Overload.
“For what it’s worth, here’s how I plan on eliminating my RSS information overload:
1. Subscribe only to 150 blogs at the most. These 150 will be people not search feeds from PubSub, Feedster, etc. and I will read them every day or at least try to. And I will update this list and add and remove people at least once a month. This group I will call MUSTS.
2. For the companies and blogs that I write, I will create PubSub and Feedster feeds for these companies’ and blogs’ keywords as well as RSS feeds for links to their URLs. This will be called WORK. I intend to keep this list to 100 feeds or less.
3. The rest (over 500!) will go into NICE TO READ and I will set them to the items to auto-expire so that if I don’t read them for 24 hours, they are deleted. And if I find something in a NICE TO READ consistently, then I will promote it to MUSTS.”
Not a bad strategy, for those who believe in information overload (IO) Personally, I don’t. I believe that IO is human-made, and thus, avoidable. We are not forced to subscribe to over 500 feeds, or have thousands of messages coming into my inbox every day from electronic mailing lists. If we didn’t read anything, we wouldn’t suffer from IO. IO is a self-made/self fulfilling prophecy that doesn’t need to exist because we create it.
I found out that the best way to go about keeping current is to first figure out how much time you have per day to keep up. Then, figure out how long it takes to read the important professional literature/weblogs/etc everyday. Then, grab all of the important stuff that fits into the time frame that you have set out for yourself. The term important is imperative here. Pick the truly important content. If you have to question whether or not something is important or not, chances are that it isn’t. The last thing to do is to purge resources that aren’t “putting out” on a regular basis to make room for potentially better resources. Voila. No IO, no complaining that you suffer from IO, and spouses, bosses, and individuals are happier. Done.