Partially Attended

an irregularly updated blog by Ian Mulvany

How I learned to stop worrying and love RSS

Sun Dec 21, 2008

245 Words





I am, one might say, a bit of an RSS junkie. It has been the main source of

news and information for me for about the last year or so, but I began to

feel as if I was drowning in it. I subscribe to something over 80 feeds,

some of which, like techcrunch, spit out over 40 or 50 items a day. A few

days away from my feed reader and there could be well over 1000 entries

waiting when I got back. I had them split down into lots of different

folders, based on interest, but it was just all getting too much, so I've

adopted a simple strategy which has totally gotten over the problem. I could

have just dropped all

I now only have 3 folders. Work Important, Personal Imortant and everything

else. I'll read everything in the first two folders, but the threshold for

getting into the first is very high, and the threshold for getting into the

second is basically personal blogs from close friends. Everything else goes

into the 3rd folder and if something doesn't jump out at me when I scan

quickly through this folder then I just delete everything. Now the time to

process all of these feeds is about 10 minutes.



I do have ideas about how to viksualise this river of information, but

perhaps I'll leave those ideas until I get a Google App account.






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