rss

Why Are You Reading All That News?

wood.tang — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:41:54 -0500

When I wrote about my method for controlling RSS overload a couple weeks ago, 43 Folders user terceiro left a comment that put me in my place:

You’re feeling stress about your RSS feeds? Talk about self-created problems. The real solution to managing RSS feeds is to stop reading RSS feeds. It’s simple ... when a purely optional “convenience” technology is causing stress, it’s time to re-evaluate at a pretty fundamental level.

I read this and thrashed and spluttered like Yosemite Sam for a while before I admitted it: he's right. It is a self-created problem, and I need to understand what makes me feel the need to consume the equivalent of a Carnegie library every day, instead of just finding a more efficient way to choke it down.

When I read discussions about managing RSS and information overload, I tend to see three justifications for why people "need" to subscribe to 842 news feeds:

I want to stay informed about the world - Meaning, I never want to be one of those idiots on Jay Leno who can't name the Vice President. I identify with this impulse the most strongly.
I need to for my job - Particularly for IT folk, usually along the lines of, "I need to stay on top of developments in programming/web design/cat herding so I can advance my career."
I need to for my blog - As in, "I need to follow all these different feeds to find interesting stuff to pass along to my readers." Everybody wants to be Jason Kottke or John Gruber.

After thinking about my own motivations and admitting that I've uttered all three of those at some point as well, my answer to every one would be, "Really?" Are you really going to miss that promotion if you didn't hear about the JDK update the second it was released? Are you really going to lose readers if you don't link to that third Boing Boing post? And are you really going to turn into a sheltered, mouth-breathing Epsilon if you happen to skip the news cycle one day?

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. That's all fine and dandy if that's the person I want to be, but within reason. I should know by now from experiences with other jobs, other vocations, and other vices, that if they start to cause me this kind of concern, something needs to change.

"The world won't end without you knowing it. Trust me, your mom will call."

This isn't to say that we should all chuck our newsreaders and smash our TVs, but that we should, like terceiro said in that comment, keep a little perspective. In terms of those first two reasons above, we don't give ourselves enough credit for being the smart, inquisitive people that we are. Even if you shut down the RSS reader for a few days, you'll still know everything you need to know to do your job right. The fact that you possess such a powerful thirst for knowledge will cause you to absorb it passively wherever you go, from snatches of overheard conversations, TV, and radio. It will be enough until you have more time and energy to read it yourself. And the world won't end without you knowing it. Trust me, your mom will call.

In regards to #3, we can also get a little full of ourselves at times. Despite wishful thinking, there aren't many bloggers who would be missed if they took a day off here and there. Take this site for instance; I bet you didn't even notice Merlin was gone. Unless it really is your job, you should probably pull up short when it starts to feel like one.

Here's a suggestion: over the holidays when you're traveling, or when things are slow because everyone else is traveling, remove yourself from the news cycle for a few days and see if you don't shrivel up and die. Take long walks. Cancel something. And when you come back and open your newsreader again, hit that "Mark All as Read" button and start from scratch. I've started doing that 2-3 times a week now, and it feels glorious.

”Why Are You Reading All That News?” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 11, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Laying Pipes

wood.tang — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:55:57 -0500

Since I've been on an RSS kick this week, I wanted to pass along a tip about Yahoo Pipes, a pretty slick, albeit nerdy, "composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web." In a nutshell, it lets you mix, match, slice, and dice web searches and RSS feeds to your heart's content.

I found it after one of my editors gave me assignment to track down what people outside of Chicago are writing about our local sports teams. Unless I wanted to comb through thousands of search results or new feeds, I had to figure out a way to set up an efficient, automated search on each of the teams that could filter out stuff by the local rags.

My first instinct was to set up a big search in Google News, then subscribe to the RSS feed of the results. I consulted with a friend who's a renowned Google ninja, and he suggested I try Pipes instead, because it would allow me to exclude any news source I wanted, suppress duplicate items, and mix it all up into one nice feed.

I've been playing with Pipes for the last couple days, and it's not for the faint of heart. Anyone who's had experience with a workflow or integration development environment (webMethods, represent!) will instantly recognize the design palette. It's ultra-programmy, but I'm guessing anyone who thinks they need to consolidate, filter, and sort RSS feeds won't be daunted by that. What's nice though is that there are a number of example pipes that other smart people have developed already, so if you're not up for building your own, you can still jump right in.

I'm interested to see if anyone else is doing anything cool with Pipes, so leave your tips in the comments.

”Laying Pipes” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 30, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups

wood.tang — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:03:03 -0500

Besides baseball, coffee, and my music collection, I probably obsess over how I read RSS feeds more than anything. Sometimes it feels like I tinker with the setup more than I actually read the news, but I'm making progress. I won't claim to be completely satisfied with how or why I try to consume so much information from the internet, but lately I've been as content with the process as I can hope.

Bailing Out

Trying to stay on top of dozens of feeds can feel like trying to squeeze a river through a kitchen strainer. I used to be a NetNewsWire guy, but I switched to Google Reader this summer to simplify switching between multiple computers. At first it exacerbated the feeling that for what little info I could process through that strainer, I might as well just give up and let it flood the place.

Unlike more powerful desktop readers like NNW, Google Reader doesn't give you any options to control the refresh rate of feeds, how long they stay in your queue before disappearing, etc. So if I missed a day, or even a few hours without checking in, hundreds of unread items would keep piling up, with no chance of my ever finishing them. So I started marking hundreds of items at a time as read, and sure enough I felt better. It was like dipping a bucket in the river instead of trying to drink the whole thing, and after a few days I realized it was okay to let a few things pass me by.

Group Them the Way You Read Them

The magic trick for me though, has to do with how I group the feeds in Google Reader. This can be accomplished with any modern news reader, but the Google's does things in a particular way that really hits a sweet spot.

When given the option to group things, we tend to do it topically, with labels like "Sports," "Technology," "Blogs," etc. For years, I lumped my feeds into folders like this, thinking it would help me manage them, but all it did was help me ignore just how many I'd subscribed to by tucking them away in folders. I still looked at the growing numbers of unread items and felt that endless sense of dread that I would never finish.

Knowing how to cut my losses when I got behind was nice, but it was also making me miss a lot of stuff that I wished I hadn't. I didn't mind skipping through some feeds, like standard news or high-frequency group blogs, but I felt bad missing my friend's weekly update, or that new column from one of my favorite writers. So it dawned on me to group my feeds by the way in which I want to read them, not by topic. If there were some feeds that I didn't mind missing, and some of which I wanted to read every single word, I should organize them that way, not by their putative subject areas. Here's what I came up with:

News - Self-explanatory, but specifically feeds from traditional news outlets like the New York Times, BBC, et al that pump out so much stuff I can't possibly hope to keep up. I usually read this group starting with the newest items first, and stop and delete the rest when I get tired. I won't miss anything; if I get behind, most of those items are either updates on breaking stories, or tidbits I've already heard elsewhere on TV or the radio.
Can't Miss - Again, pretty obvious, but these are my favorite sites, ones where I want to at least scan every single item, like blogs of friends, publications where I write, etc. Not just anything can go in here--this group has a high barrier to entry to keep its volume manageable.
Skip 'Em - The aforementioned feeds that I like to read when I have time, but don't mind missing either. Grouping them together like this makes it easy to dump them en masse on one of those days where I just don't have the time or energy. However, this shouldn't be an excuse to subscribe to every bleeping feed you see; I still try to keep this bunch to a minimum.
Not News - This is a combination of the Can't Miss and Skip 'Em groups. I usually like to read the standard news over breakfast, then save this one for later. It also makes a nice subset to peruse later in the day when I've had my fill of the ticker tape feeds. This is another area where Google Reader helped out, because it uses a tagging model that makes it easy to group things in multiple folders.

Again, nothing revolutionary, but it's made my daily information gathering process more manageable, namely because it gives me an easy way out when I've fallen behind.

Process Your Pleasure

The obvious alternative to all this would be to simply cut the number of feeds I try to follow, and I wholeheartedly agree. Like I said, I have a pretty high threshold for what gets into the club, and keeping things in that Skip 'Em folder makes it easy to identify which ones might be on the chopping block. But this approach gives me the latitude to read broadly in a number of subject areas and still focus on the most important stuff.

The fact that I felt compelled to write about this is quite ridiculous, really. I've taken what should be a leisurely activity and turned it into a dull process. But I also realized that I derive a lot of pleasure from reading all these news sites and blogs, and there was no sense in depriving myself. The dull process has kept it enjoyable.

”Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 27, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"