Right around the time Reeder died out on the Mac, so he could re-tweak and design for Mavericks, I decided no more RSS feeds for me. I went through a phase where I deleted all of my browser bookmarks, tried Pocket, Readability, and even tried to use Twitter as a “feed” of sorts. That didn’t suit my needs, or workflows, and now, I want my feeds back.
But I have been digging, scouring the Internet for tools, services, and more to obtain, what I want and how I want it. Deciding where I stand and what I like to read and write about has become more of an issue that I had previously thought. I am slowly crawling back into the RSS scene.
What tools to use, what service to pay for are the questions I have, but not the biggest one:
How do I overcome Quality over Quantity?
While the tools and services are few and far between, the feeds themselves are overwhelming. With sites such as Churchm.ag, iMore, Cult of Mac, Macdaily.co and many many large online publications posting multiple articles a day the feeds become unmanageable. If you step away from your ‘iDevice’ or laptop even for a second, you may have lost out on the scoop of the century, and ended up re-posting something 127 times over again.
So the problem at hand, how do you end up with a list of feeds that give you what you want and in a quantity that you want?
NO one wants to be the guy getting back from a weeks vacation only to find out that 1327 tech articles have been posted, and RSS anxiety weighs heavy.
Not this guy!
It’s simple, what I want, it’s what we all want:
Quality over Quantity
Can I get an Amen?!?!
So before I jump headlong into RSS, I may need to re-evaluate truly what I want from the tech scene. The news I truly want filling my Reeder or inbox. There may be services that I am missing? There may be apps that do this (Fever comes to mind) that rank the news as it comes in in terms of priority to read, but this doesn’t quite cover it for me.
Chris Wilson says
Funnily enough, when reader died I was encouraged by some blogs to sign up to their email list. I did so for my favourites and yet, with very few exceptions, I have almost stopped reader those sites. There maybe an element of the site quality declining or me moving on but I also wonder if I found that amount of notification too much (and realised I really didn’t want them in my inbox!).
Now I have a system where I have unread RSS (and feedwrangler) for the sites I never want to miss (but don’t want in my inbox!) feedly for the sites that publishing multiple items a day and I want to skim through and I only subscribe via email to roundup newsletters. I may ignore feedly for a while if I’m feeling overwhelmed and I have very limited items in the other two but it *seems* to be working okay at the moment.
All the “smart” options leave me a bit queazy at the moment, I’m not sure why but I guess I don’t trust them!
Matthew Snider says
I hear ya for sure.
As of right now, I haven’t looked at an RSS client in months. Not sure I want to now.
Andrew Fallows says
The root of this problem is a matter of signal-to-noise ratio.
One of the first big blogs I ever followed was Lifehacker. When I discovered it, those years ago, it was already popular, but it was small enough and low enough volume that even though not every post was super useful to me, filtering out the ones that didn’t matter was a small task. Today, though, Lifehacker is big enough and prolific enough that I no longer follow it because I spent more time hitting “next” on bum articles than I do reading good ones.
The thing that works for me is being aggressive about choosing that a feed just doesn’t have enough signal. I’ll add it, keep it for a little while, and if I realize it’s just not giving me anything good, I drop it. The really best stuff manages to make the rounds anyway.
I’m also using NewsBlur, which is easily the best news reader I’ve ever used (it makes Google Reader look lame, in my personal opinion). It does cost a couple bucks, but I get my money’s worth! It has better features for finding, adding, removing, and organizing my feeds than others I’ve used, which makes me more willing and eager to curate my list.
Eric Dye says
How do you find ChurchMag’s feed to be? Or don’t we make the cut? 😉