I have a love hate relationship with RSS feed readers. Every once in awhile I try and get into them but end up getting frustrated and reverting back to just checking sites for updates. Whats the problem? Information overload. Like to check the top articles on Digg? Watch whats happens when you add digg's RSS feed to your feed reader. I didn't check it for ONE day and I had over a 1000 back entries. Add a couple more firehose sites and you have just created an information flood.
Using feed readers this way is obviously not ideal. Overtime and many attempts later I have discovered how to use feed readers so its not so overwhelming. A year ago I was trying to find a site to had news about recent events from Google. I couldn't really find it. I could find a handful of blogs that were covering happenings at Google. Also I found the collection of corporate blogs that google uses to communicate with the public. Instead of tracking these ~30 or so sites seperatly I decided to add them all to google reader. This setup worked perfectly there are only about 10-15 or so new articles coming in a day and each article hold interesting information that I want to read. Where before I was getting blasted with so much information 9 times out of 10 I could care less about what the article was talking about.
I hope this helps someone else tame the beast and happy reading.
Here is the short version. Rules for taming a feed reader:
* No aggregating sites such as slashdot, digg etc
* Only pick sites that have quality posts not links to posts with brief comments
* Limit the amount of feeds that you track
Huntsville,
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