Lately I’ve been getting mightily annoyed with the daily feed reading – hard as I try, the feed count is straining to creep upwards, constantly testing the limits of the little daily time I have for reading. And it seems that whatever I try, much of that reading time is wasted on duplicate posts – essentially, people in the same conversation saying pretty much exactly the same thing – and on empty wells – posts that seem at first glance to offer something on a particular topic but aren’t very useful or interesting, or are only ostensibly about a particular topic, and are really more about something else entirely.
A few examples may be in order. First, as much as I love Techmeme (who doesn’t?), many of the posts arrayed under a main post are only tangentially on topic, or aren’t on topic at all (they may, for example, be generally about the same company, but on different topics). So much of the time I spend drilling down for more discussion on that topic is pretty much completely wasted. Recently, I’ve been drilling down less – too many empty wells – and I’m using Techmeme really just to see headlines.
Second, there’s an enormous amount of chatter in any particular conversation. There are many kinds of chatter, but in my book the worst is posts that consist of “Hey, so-and-so said this, here’s a link. And here’s a link to some other people who are talking about it, too. How about that.” We’ve all done it – I do it far too often. I have no idea why. But my feedreader is full of it.
Third, there are so many people talking in the ‘sphere now that the proportion of truly novel and original thought or writing seems to be asymptotically approaching zero. Few among us are capable of anything truly novel (no doubt some among you feel that about this blog – fair enough), and with the explosion of content we’ve seen it’s getting awfully hard to find the gems. This isn’t so much a dry well problem as it is panning for gold problem – one has to sift a lot of dirt to find anything of value.
So what I’d like is a feedreader that magically and reliably solves all these problems for me – relevance, “quality” (whatever that means), summarization and reliability all served up in a daily feed. I haven’t seen anything like this yet (though I’ve just learned about AideRSS, which might be interesting). All suggestions gratefully received.
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I struggle with this issue as well. Its easy to waste too much time viewing feeds – I tend to skim the topics quickly – but then is that not what the technology should do for us? There will always be a few key sites that we want to see all the posts, but for many, it would be great if we could have the relevant bits cherry picked off for us.
I also struggle with this when deciding what to post on my blog. Its too hard to win the “you read it here first” race, so I don’t even bother trying. Some of my posts, especially the reproductions of my weekly newspaper column, are (I hope) somewhat original, or at least come at things from a different point of view. But many are the dreaded simple reference to a post of another. To some extent it depends on your readership, and the readers you want to attract. There is more value to a link to other sites if your readership is not likely to track that other site. And sometimes the other person has already said something so well that we might as well simply acknowledge that with a link, rather than trying to be original and add to the chatter.
I think it would be cool to have an app that even allowed one to customize the summarizing / relevancy criteria. Perhaps it would watch what you read and skip or read and really *read*, as well.
But something needs to be done. I’m drowning in it (!)
Agree with you on writing. I think the thing is to speak about what interests you. Others will or won’t read depending on a variety of factors, but one can at least avoid the temptation to write about what’s *popular*.
Rob I can’t remember if you’re on a Mac or PC, but the “Popular Topics” feature in FeedDemon is pretty powerful. It lets you look at what folks within your own subscriptions are talking about as well as people who use Newsgator Online. I can look at Today, Yesterday, last 24 hrs, last 48 hrs, and last 5 days. I’ve found it gives results much different than Techmeme or other memetrackers.
Thanks for this, Tris – I’m a Mac guy. They must have added that to FD after I left Windows.
Rob/David, I feel your pain, in fact that’s exactly how AideRSS came to be. My problem with most tools today is that they try to solve information overload by presenting you with even more information: “hey you like this, you’ll like that as well!” Collaborative filtering is great, but it doesn’t address the actual problem.
AideRSS is a different way of looking at the same problem – we look at individual authors, and rank their content with respect to themselves only. This way, while still relying on ‘social popularity/engagement’ metrics, at least you’re not at a whim of the latest social gossip/meme. Essentially, we allow the reader to set a performance bar for the author: “give me only the posts which are above your average response rate”. I’m not claiming that this is a perfect system, but we found that it works great for peripheral interests (that cooking blog, etc.)
In short, it does sound like you should definitely give AideRSS a try, and we’ll keep you posted on our progress.
Best,
Ilya Grigorik
ilya@aiderss.com
Thanks, Ilya – sounds great.
aideRSS sounds very cool … is it invite only?
So far, yes, I think.
Tris, just sent you an invite!
Rob – I’ve found the “Auto” sort function on Google Reader has been quite helpful. Basically it pushes noisier blogs down and floats less “noisy” blogs to the top (but with all things Google it also mixes things up with an algorithm or two).
I’ve found it makes things a lot more efficient so my skim sessions are more productive, and when I have time to read more I can dig deeper into the potpourri pile of noisy blogs (like lifehacker etc.)
Thanks, Ryan – will check that out.
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