rss

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.

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.

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.