Where is Merlin? Will he be back?

I wrote a similar comment on your last post. The gist of it was to evaluate what you do in the context of WHAT YOU actually DO.

The point is not to cancel stuff, even though that is part of the idea. You do have to block out stuff that simply is irrelevant to your life. And, a la, Neil Fiore’s unschedule, you have to plan in breaks in whatever you do to recharge yourself.

But the point, above all, is to make all your activities fit some kind of greater purpose in life. Because it is your life you’re living, not the life of the newsfeeds you’re following.

David Allen, in GTD makes a similar point about making all the stuff in your “inbox” actionable, and if that’s not possible, file or throw it away.

And, like terceiro, I’m sorry if this comment makes me sound like an ass, but I firmly believe in this philosophy.

I think the “How to pare down the clothes in your closet” analogy applies here: if you don’t use it, it goes. Pick an RSS feed that feels like overkill to you — you know which ones those are — and live without it for a week or two. When the blackout period is over, determine how much you really missed it.

DId you find yourself regularly returning to the source site to check information? This is a big one, in my mind. If I didn’t need the information (or care enough) to click on the bookmark to the full-blown site, I clearly don’t need the daily (hourly, minute-ly) digest.

Did you feel less informed during the blackout? tercerio addressed nicely in his comment.

That old sweater of an RSS feed may be comfortable to have around, but if you’re not wearing it, you’ll never miss it.

A personal example: I am a writer, my life revolves around the entertainment industry (with a healthy overlap in geek culture), so I found myself regularly checking Ain’t It Cool News a lot. Three revelations I had (no AICN slam intended, this is just me):

1. I realized that 99.9% of the information I was getting there I was reading for at least the second time, and there is nothing on that site that clarifies, enhances or changes my perspective on the old information.

2. When I did click through to the site, I found myself irritated MUCH more often than entertained or enlightened. Much more = always vs. never.

3. And this was a big one in deciding to kill it: When I saw the little number next to my “movies” RSS group, then discovered that the bulk of the new posts were AICN, I was disappointed.

Disappointed. Wow. The reddest of red flags. I subscribed to the RSS feed, I grouped it, I clicked on it… and when it did what it was supposed to do, it made me feel bad. Yeah, time to go.

On Bloglines Beta, (actually, it’s on an internal alpha) we’ve been experimenting with a feed-o-meter. It measures you’re feed reading speed. Initially, it’s a little depressing. Because it calculates the total time required to read all of those unread posts and in general that’s a big number.

But then all of sudden, it gets you motivated to increase your feed-reading speed or in other words, hit “mark all read” and delete those noisy feeds that don’t value to your life.

Ah liberation. Learning to let go is good.

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I’m a lightweight, I only have about 15-20 feeds I read, but I tried this in Google Reader:

I created three priority levels:

1 - High 2 - Medium 3 - Low

And I assigned all of my feeds a priority level in addition to whatever category I felt I needed to put them in.

Once I did that, I leave the Google Reader gadget on my iGoogle homepage set to display only “1 - High” items; these are either work-related or some special-case items.

Now, instead of looking at Google Reader and seeing the 56 items that have accumulated in the past hour or so, I may see two or three; I can take a mini-break and read them. If I get an actual break or am on lunch, I flip to “2 - Medium” and will browse more stuff; I try to browse the “3 - Low” category no more than once a day.

As I write this, I realized that I can do away with “3 - Low” and just use the All Items view, once I’m done with the first two thresholds. Or I can browse by category.

If you want to be really hardcore, you can probably just get away with having one “Priority” grouping and let everything else collect in All Items.

I use Vienna - http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php

Apropos Vincent’s post - I have a ton of feeds because I do a ton of research. I use smart feed groups to look for certain subject groups like “climate change”, “sustainability” instead of focusing on a group of sites. … It really helps because then I don’t have to worry about going through all 300 + feeds all the time.

For the feeds that I really like, I tend to just visit the site instead during a break in work to give me a reward for focusing. Feeds to me help to contextualize the rest of the information I am working on. And they help with research.

However, since I don’t check them over the weekend, I typically mark all of them as read when I get to my desk on Monday morning - there is nothing more daunting than seeing 17,000 new articles in your RSS inbox!

Yeah, so it’s really about WHAT you are using the feeds for. Besides, most of the bestest synthesizing of information you can get on your way home listening to All Things Considered :)

I can’t think of anything an RSS feed can do for me that my Bookmarks Toolbar doesn’t already do.

Sharing this with the class may make me look like a crusty old luddite. Oh, well. I just can’t see any way a feed makes it quicker or easier to actually read what I want to read.

“For me, it’s always been a matter of identity. I like to view myself as an informed, plugged in, man of the digital world, and to be this person, I think I need to see all the latest news, comment on the hot blogs, post things on del.icio.us.”

Oh, my. This is ME. (I justify it under the #2 umbrella - my job really does require me to be plugged in to pop culture and current events and a general sort of wide knowledge, I’m a programs and collection development person in a public library - but really, I do the work I do because it’s who I am.)

I keep my reader (Google) set to “show updated only,” so once I’ve skimmed it, it’s GONE. I know I could go dig it up again if I suddenly needed the third link down in the Lifehacker story from a week ago, but 99% of the time, I don’t - becoming aware of the information once is all I need. If it’s something I want to slow down and read more carefully, I do NOT do that in the reader - I open it in a new tab, and if I want to come back to it, I tag it on del.icio.us. Never, never, never star an item. My reader is not an information filing system; it’s an Inbox, in the GTD sense, and that’s ALL it is, and I force myself to keep it that way. That allows me to handle a much higher throughput of information with less stress than if I were trying to keep track of everything I’m reading!

You’d be better off actually reading one quality news feed, than in marking as read dozens without reading them. And for “real” news, there is basically no reason to read multiple sites.

If other people want to be filters, I say let them. If there’s a good article in the New Republic or the Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts & Letters daily will link to it. So I don’t need to read those feeds directly. Most memes and so forth will eventually make it to Kottke or BB. Ars Technica covers the entire tech industry pretty well, from policy to hardware.

I think this is relevant enough to warrant a comment to this post.

I’m interested to learn what feeds you find useful in this aspect. That is, quality over quantity.

In this case I’m referring more to world news. Tech news tends to be well covered in this respect. I find myself as one who doesn’t read the newspaper or watch the news, so I try to stay connected online, though I’ve run into the aforementioned problem, I think mainly because I can’t find a good news feed that doesn’t (a) inundate me with stories I don’t care about or (b) leaves me out of the loop.

What gems in the rough do you have for me?

What I really want in a news reader is a filter I can train. I want something like the Spam filters in Mail programs. On Mac OS X Leopard, this is exposed in the Latent Semantic Analysis framework: (http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/LSMSmartCategorizer/)

I want a little button that's "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" on any particular story in my feeds. Then after training the news reader for a while, I could imagine filtering by interest.

I don't see this as being any different from the spam problem in Mail readers. I want to filter out the interesting posts from the boring/useless ones.

It seems like the technology is there. Why haven't news readers implemented this kind of thing? (By the way, feel free to steal my idea. I'd switch news readers in a heartbeat if one offered this.)

I’ve found a fairly good ‘middle way’ is FeedDemon’s popular topics view. Basically, it looks through all your subscribed feeds, and presents you with a list of things that lots of people are linking to. I’ve found it works really well if you want to just skim things quickly.

Sadly FeedDemon is only available for Windows, but I can thoroughly recommend it even so.

Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy has a nice chapter on going on a media diet. His model: Create a media portfolio with two main components: Lineup and Tryouts. Lineup: Those that've earned their place as your most valuable sources. (The three types: Stars, Scans, and Targets.) Candidate sources get into the lineup by going through a tryout phase. (Guidelines: Be discerning, be intentional, and be biased toward rejecting.)

In general, news — a stream of pieces of information, chosen to be salient, updated regularly — is literally addictive.

I have never heard anyone comment on this directly but I think it’s pretty clearly the case. It’s very easy to get used to news. And when you get used to it, you want more of it and miss it when it stops. This applies not only to RSS feeds but also to political headlines, tabloid headlines, sports scores, plot developments in soap operas, etc.. For some reason, staying “up to date” is calming and comfortable, almost opiating. Maybe it’s just a learned association, like a mental version of an animal always knowing where it’s food bowl is. Really, I don’t know why news so addictive.

But I think you can see the compulsive, addictive aspect of people’s news-reading when you reflect on how often the stuff they read is really totally irrelevant to their daily life and would also represent an exceedingly shallow and random way to explore a genuine interest. The idea of “staying informed” is just an excuse — a widely and sincerely held excuse, but still an excuse.

When the news topic is something important, like a presidential election, millions can become addicted to headlines, pat themselves on the back for their high-minded tastes, and never notice that in their analytical depth and emotional structure these headlines are in fact appealing to everyone as nothing more than a kind of soap opera. People are really there for the regular and mildly varied stimulation — the “information” is beside the point.

It can be fun to follow soap operas, and it makes you feel connected to other to know that they’re following it too. But it’s a pastime, not a virtue.

I found a fairly unique way to cope with the flood of RSS information. I use a Firefox add-in called InfoRSS, which puts my RSS feeds in a ticker style scrollbar. That way, if something catches my eye I click on the headline in the scrollbar and read the full story. Otherwise it just passes by and I never notice. No pressure from unread numbers and as each story comes around a fair number of times there’s a good chance that if it’s important enough I’ll see it.