How do you read your feeds?
Yeah, you could say I regularly work hours that many would call, well, kind of crazy — and when I’m not working I tend to stay fairly busy with something or another. But if there’s one thing I can’t seem to get ahead and stay ahead of most days, it’s my feeds. I have about 90-100 feeds in my NetNewsWire (maybe 30 of those are high throughput sources), and it still seems like there’s often simply too much content to mesh with the level of time I have to get a handle on it (thus resulting in a the frequent and unfortunate use of mark all as read, and a gradually shrinking OPML). Naturally, the irony isn’t lost on me; trust me, Engadget readers experiencing news overload have my complete sympathy. It’s not like Engadget doesn’t rack up more unread articles in my aggregator than almost any other publication I subscribe to, too (save linkregators like Reddit and Digg).
Right now I think Scoble reigns as champ of the feed-obsessed — seriously, have you seen the dude’s OPML?. He uses “impressions” (glances at stories, not deep reading), but I’m definitely curious to know what aggregators people live in, and how other heavy individual feed reading individuals get their intake without missing any of the good stuff and without scheduling their lives around RSS.
Google Reader all the way, 111 feeds and counting.
Comment by Evan Jones — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 2:54 pm
I use Google Reader with the “Clean and Professional” Stylish userstyle. Have about 20 or so feeds atm. I try to keep feeds that I will regularly keep updated on. Digg and Engadget get the most attention though.
Comment by Kyle — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 3:13 pm
I use Google Reader as well. Close to 500 feeds ranging from all different subjects. I simply allot myself a number of hours a day to go through my feeds. I enjoy the overload :)
Comment by Ariel Waldman — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 3:15 pm
Like the other readers, I use Google Reader. I personally hate the white (especially late at night) but I love how it follows me from computer to computer to my iPhone… you get the idea.
I employ the technique of scanning the headline and then reading the story or moving on. I’d say this results in me reading around 10% of the posts I get. I’d like to get to 25% but…
Comment by Stefan — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 3:17 pm
Well, I’m another Google Reader user. I’ve fairly low compared to the others, on just 38 subscriptions. I tend to just read them in the morning when I wake up. Google Reader is nice and simple, and easy to use. :)
Comment by Dave — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 3:38 pm
Google Reader all the way. Google Reader tells me, “From your 113 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 9,311 items, starred 27 items, shared 27 items, and emailed 32 items.”
For a long time I used Newsgator’s Outlook plugin, but it was a pain if I used Outlook on several computers. I do miss having RSS news delivered to my Inbox, but having everything centeralized in a web app makes the best sense.
The only time I still subscribe via Outlook is when the feed is secure and shouldn’t be shared.
Comment by Otto — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 4:18 pm
I’ve been using Google Reader virtually all year. 200+ feeds (including this one), and 600-800 stories a day. I’d previously used a mix of NetNewsire and Safari RSS.
Comment by Louis Gray — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 4:45 pm
Google Reader, went and came back to Feeds overload. Had 200 hundred and couldn’t keep up. Now I’m at 98, with 40 being strictly job related (Economics) and the rest including the twitter and flickr feeds, which make half of the items. Now, If I’m overloaded is strictly by the WSJ or other good economic blog that I should be reading.
One key to success was the help of feedhub.com . I’ve put the 100 not that important feeds and tell them to send me content on a kinda random basis. I’ve also made a netvibes page with feeds that are best appreciated with a quick glance at the titles, as Engadget, Gizmodo, Techmeme , Techcrunch, Lifehacker, etc
Comment by Jorge — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
I use FeedDemon synced with NewsGator online so I can view the feeds on my pda. Right now I read about 143 feeds. To keep from getting bogged down, I skim over the headlines until I see something that interests me. For example with Engadget Mobile, I scroll past anything related to T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint because they’re not my carrier of choice so I don’t care what phones they’re getting ready to launch.
Comment by JT — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 5:03 pm
JT, sounds like you should unsubscribe from the Mobile main feed and subscribe to the AT&T feed! Most AT&T related news (new phones, business, etc.) is there.
http://www.engadgetmobile.com/category/atandt/rss.xml
Just add “rss.xml” to any category, tag, or main comment thread on Engadget for an RSS feed.
Comment by Ryan Block — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 5:13 pm
But wouldn’t that cause me to only get AT&T related stuff? Still like reading about other mobile gear/products, just not T-Mobile or CDMA.
Comment by JT — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 5:21 pm
Ryan, I’m in teh same boat as you. I use Google Reader, and have about 100+ feeds that I’ve tried to significantly cut back on lately. My biggest offenders of content overload were once Digg, Engadget, and Boing Boing.
I’ve since unsubscribed from everything but Engadget, but I’ve got to be honest, I’m on the verge of doing the same with it. There’s simply too much content updated every day for anyone with a full-time job to keep on top of and actually absorb.
I think this is an issue you guys need to address, either through stricter editorial (are all the new TV/electronics release posts really necessary?) or by summarizing the posts daily somehow. I used to love the Engadget podcast because it was often my only way of catching up on the week’s news from the site in a format that I could digest.
Comment by Adam — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 5:51 pm
Duh, Google Reader. I’ve been telling you this for months.
Comment by veronica — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 6:49 pm
I use NetNewWire on my desktop (Mac OS X), with a periodically updated list of Smart Folders configured to tune into topics I’m currently interested in (ie. “Leopard”, “Vista”, “HSDPA”, “Ryan Block”, etc).
On the road I use NewGator Mobile (for iPhone). My feeds, and read state sync between NNW and NewsGator Mobile so I have a seemless experience while skimming the ~150 feeds I follow (which includes this blog and Lady V’s). Skimming headlines, saving good reads for later and viciously marking entire feeds all read when there is nothing of interest is the only way to stave off RSS feed overload.
Later,
Comment by devotion — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 6:59 pm
Adam,
I found that the best way to keep up with sites as Engadget, Lifehacker, Digg is to put their feed in Netvibes. You go there once/twice a day and look at the headlines or the excerpts hoving the mouse over the titles. It’s a lot cleaner.
Plus, the certain tech site, run by certain people, whose page I’m commenting on, tends to republish their breaking news feed from time to time and this way you avoid having 50 not-new tech posts you’ve already read or avoided.
:-)
Comment by Jorge — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 7:40 pm
I’ve been using the reader built into IE7. Its actually pretty good.
Comment by Mitchel Tyrell — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 8:09 pm
I’m sure I’ll sound stupid for this, but I use Safari. I have my RSS feeds grouped by type (general news, tech news, blogs, etc.) into folders on my bookmarks bar, and it tells me quickly how many unread I have in each type. I can then schedule some time throughout my day (general news in the AM, tech news in the early noonish, blogs in the evening). I like Safari because it’s simple, clean, searchable, and lets me set criteria by feed. I’m sure all the others do the same (probably), but I don’t feel it necessary to use another app when Safari does what I want how I want.
Comment by John B. — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 11:10 pm
Am a big fan of FeedDemon - extremely fast and sports some very unique features like Prefetch and Attention reading list.
Comment by Amit Agarwal — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 11:40 pm
Hey what ever happened to Yahoo! Pipes. I imagine you could spend days constructing the most complex feeds pipe. Or we could throw an event and spend an evening playing halo and piping. We could even tell people we were having a pipe party, and let them be shocked as they confuse us for stoners.
That or honestly (and I know your occupational duties demand it) but you could try reducing your feeds, or dare I say, abandon the feed concept. About a year ago, I went from a heavy feeder (around 60) to zero. It became to much work (again totally understand that’s literally what it is for you) to keep up. I ditched feeds, and went back to standard browsing. It’s amazing how much better I feel. No really. To be in control of my own info collecting. You might be surprised how little you actually lose by doing this. It’s a fantastic system. Think of it like natural selection for information, only your active process of going for information means that certain sources have to out compete others. Some may have great content but only update twice a month. Others maybe have 20 posts a day, most of which are insignificant.
Some people think feed managing can do this, and I’m open to the idea, but I don’t think it works as well, and one is still flooded in even the best feed managed system I’ve seen. Humans are very good and searching, especially when they develop particular process for a specific niche. By making yourself the primary active gatherer, you’ll actually be doing less work. Again, I’m not sure how well that switch would work for someone in your position, but since doing this, I’ve actually diversified my resource base (important to me), deepened my knowledge, and saved time.
Or maybe we should just have a party with the halo and no kinds of pipes and you just let everyone pick one feed to delete from your reader!! And pizza.
Comment by Joe — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 12:52 am
Heh, I use Google Reader.
I read 903 feeds now (the OPML you linked to above is VERY old — I should post a more recent one somewhere). I put the best stuff on my link blog at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/14480565058256660224
Engadget shows up there a LOT.
Comment by Robert Scoble — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 1:52 am
I use FeedDemon (linked to NewsGator), 392 feeds, I group my feeds into folders, e.g. Hardware, Xbox, Software etc, scroll (with wheel mouse) 50 items (full text) at a time scanning the items for things that I may want to read in full, which I then open in Opera running side by side with FeedDemon, as I move to the next 50 items they are marked as read.
I read the feeds of sites I like most first then move onto the others, also use FeedDemon’s Watches feature to group items with selected keywords, I try to give about an hour or two a day to my feeds to keep on top of them, but if I do get a backlog I will just mark some of the high throughput feeds such as Digg as read.
I also use linkblogs such as Robert Scoble’s to filter and see stuff without the need for me to subscribe to as many feeds.
Having a high res screen helps a lot it’s far easier and quicker to scan my feeds on my laptop at 1920 x 1200 then on my older desktop at 1152 x 864, the extra height is a must.
Comment by Zufoo — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 2:07 am
I’m using trawlr.com (http://www.trawlr.com/), subscribed to 577 feeds. Feeds are filtered via taggging / favourite and read in a “river of news” style view.
Comment by Ben — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 5:51 am
I chunk the massive amount of feeds into more digestible segments. I often start with a few aggregators, to ensure I am aware of the top stories. In Google Reader, I have a folder for the top 20 feeds I must read each day. From there, I organize feeds by category, and get to them as I can. In addition to this, I need to balance the print newspapers and magazines I read. Good luck!
Comment by Dan Blank — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 6:06 am
JJJJJJJJJJJ In Greader. I have it organized into high level folders that I tackle one at a time. I read a lot of advertising/marketing/new media/trend blogs thus they require a great deal more deep diving than more pure news and tech news, but you just have to make time.
102 feeds… Tiring… Stop launching awesome new blogs, I can’t stop the addiction.
Comment by seni thomas — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 7:51 am
I use Google Reader. I love it but the trouble is I don’t seem to be able to catch up. I missed 1 day and got the 1000+ unread items message. BTW - I just added your feed :)
Comment by Josh — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 10:45 am
Google reader for the win. 128 subscriptions, but a lot of these I just speed read. I’ve also spent a lot of time categorizing things, putting things into folders for the day job or the personal stuff I track
Comment by Richard Baguley — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 12:40 pm
Google reader is the way to go. I went from sage in firefox to newshutch.com to google reader (much improved from the initial implementation).
From your 346 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 22,134 items, starred 2 items, shared 15 items, and emailed 0 items.
Jane
P.S. Listen to V. ;)
Comment by MissM — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 5:49 pm
I subscribe to about 250 feeds in Bloglines. I read all of them every day, but admittedly it’s my job since I do PR for Microsoft and a few other companies. I consider RSS a critical “app” (service?) for my career.
Comment by Urban Strata — Tuesday, October 30, 2007 @ 8:56 pm
I use and love google reader. I also share the ones i find most interesting on my link blog at http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeffisageek-readinglist
Comment by Jeff — Wednesday, October 31, 2007 @ 9:32 am
I quit feedreading ages ago and now I (*gasP*) have gone all retro, visiting my top twenty sites with the help of the “open bookmarks in tabs” nicely sorted daily read folder.
Yes, twenty. Never more, never less.
Comment by Rightnow-anonymous — Wednesday, October 31, 2007 @ 2:33 pm
Another thought:
RSS was invented to aggregate data and make it more consumable, right? So if I can’t keep up with reading through the feed for one site like Engadget, how do I stand a hope in hell in reading the site itself?
I think this is a bigger problem than you give it credit, Ryan.
Comment by Adam — Wednesday, October 31, 2007 @ 10:23 pm