Clean up. It seems silly to think you’ll accumulate too many feeds, but soon enough just like those awful catalogs that arrive every season you’ll have too many. Most readers come preloaded with the more popular RSS feeds anyway, most of which you’ll probably never read. How do you break down to the core essentials? The news you need without the fluff.
The Inbox. I have this awful technique for research whenever I’m about to handle some sort of info management task, I exhaust a folder with loads of potentially valuable information from across the net and then begin to sift. Hopefully finding an eventual diamond in the rough. So I recommend a flood of feeds you might want to get into and then make it a little project to slowly, but surely, sift through and find relevant feeds.
1. Dump the rumor sites. Rumors are not news. Trailers for films that will likely never see the big screen seem cruel to put a movie buff through. We need clean dependable content and for the most part, depending on your field of work I suppose, any dedicated rumor mill doesn’t deserve a reader’s time. Real content will run through the obvious channels.
Anecdote and understanding: I know when the radio finally blares a track I’ve been rotating on my stereo for weeks, I do feel this psuedo-cool for being in the know. If the psuedo-cool factor is important than by all means geekout.
2. Headlines, Determinative Feeds and Feeds by Subject. A lack of specificity can cloud your news with junk. What’s important to you? With the development of niche news you can a consistent taste of important updates in your world.
For instance two items, I like meaningful updates on a certain caribbean dictator’s life expectancy every so often and I’m roughly interested in adding a wine snob badge to my belt. CNN and the
Many of the more prolific blogs, particularly those who initially were printed publications, often have feeds specific to subjects or certain columns. As a gloss over a subject, subscribing to a Headlines Feed can be a great help. The BBC Headlines feed, can be a great way to get a general news fix. While as a software geek the Mac Gems Feed would give me the exact info I’m looking for rather than sifting through every Macworld article.
Similarly, there are thousands of wine blogs out there, and rather than dive deep into the wino world I’m might just want to scratch an itch. Wine Library’s Thunder Show(as it has been known to ‘Bring the Thunder’) does that for me. Mr. Vaynerchuk is a respectable enough authority for me to satisfy this brief interest.
3. Do you need updates? I can best make this point through web comics. Penny Arcade every M-W-F is crucial for my work week. If I were to fail at my tri-weekly watercooler nerd chat I may have to relinquish my red stapler. I digress. Now as much as I enjoy Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and certainly hold it in high regard, I don’t need the daily updates. What’s crucial for you? Merlin Mann has a great article about making this distinction.
4. No Celebrity rags. The search for genuine content has begun…
“Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
This goes for Perez Hilton and likewise most trash mags. A great way to waste some time and decompress from reality, but otherwise this can’t be considered real news.
5. Lack of original content. Press releases will show up everywhere when they break, I would stray from feeds that just putter out other people’s work without attaching some fundamental value to it.
6. Too many or too few posts? This is an issue for some people, and I can identify. It can be overwhelming to read so much. I love Valleywag and Gizmodo, for instance, but I just can’t keep up. Too much information. Too few posts on the other hand isn’t so much an issue for me as long as there is content and of substantial quality worth reading. There’s no clutter when the feeds sit tucked away in a folder and the feed just chimes in when relevant
7. To refresh or not to refresh This is a trick I find helpful since I’m always on the move. I don’t entirely care what’s going on in Miami when I’m not there. Maybe when I’m planning a trip, but otherwise not so much. Why not just have location specific updates fail to refresh. This works well when I’ve lost interest in a topic or have postponed a project, even to test run whether it holds much value for me. Rather than delete and have lost to the void valuable content, why not just press pause?
8. Being smart with folders. I think it’s understood that using Smart Folders is great for projects, but I want to go as far as recommend the use of folders to sort your feeds by relevance and subject. Folders can put into perspective the sheer number of feeds you read and allow you to gauge their importance in light of each other. I, myself, am apparently overtly concerned with the Woot, Software updates and gadgets.
That’s all I got for ya, until next time. Booya!
