Edge Cases and Aggregators

When I mentioned to Walt the other day that I’m now reading just under 600 feeds in my aggregator, he calmly said something like, “In this day, that’s not a lot” (I think he said something like that – I hadn’t even touched my first beer of the evening, so I think I am on target).

I agree. It’s really not that much. First, consider that only about 50% of these feeds will update once a day and many will update only once a week. It’s really not that much reading. It only takes me 1 hour to go through a days worth of feeds built up in my aggregator. 1 hour! And it’s very close to everything that I would want to read. While your considering that, ponder this. Many of my feeds are customized feeds from PubSub, Yahoo News, and Topix.net, which means that my aggregator (via these services) is scouring over 30 million resources for me and only bringing back what I conceivably want (that is, if I formed the right query). Wow!

It’s not about how many feeds you read, it’s what you do with them that matters. Robert Scoble subscribes to 840, but I doubt he reads 840. He probably reads far less than that every day. The power of aggregation is that we don’t have to worry about when a news story comes out or when someone mentions our company. That stuff will come to you when it happens.

Sure, Robert went a bit haywire with this edge case stuff with Liz Lawley. But he did put the whole thing into perspective when he wrote:

“How many stories does the average newspaper have? So someone who spends two hours reading the New York Times on Sunday is an “edge case”

Again, it’s not how much you “read”, but what you do with the information that you READ that counts.