Re:The case of RSS
David Sparks wrote:
If you’re not careful, every time you open your RSS reader, there will be 1,000 unread articles waiting for you, which completely defeats the purpose of using RSS. The trick to using RSS is to be brutal with your subscriptions. I think the key is looking for websites with high signal and low noise. Sites that publish one or two articles a day (or even one to two articles a week) but make them good articles are much more valuable and RSS feed than sites that published 30 articles a day.
This is a problem that I imagine a significant number of RSS users face. I’ve been through it many times myself. The last time was yesterday, when I removed two feeds from my reader that published a huge amount of content every day. It was too much for me. They dominated my article list to an overwhelming extent. That’s why I decided I had to do something about it. I definitely agree with David that reducing the noise is key to maintaining control over the content that comes our way. I’m still searching for that control and have no idea if it’s a state that can ever be achieved.
Some day Jim Mitchell wrote he deleted all sources from his RSS reader and started from scratch. It’s a tempting idea, but I don’t think I’m ready for it. Mainly because of the blogs. I know that without an RSS reader, it would be difficult for me to find some sites again. I don’t remember all the names of the blogs I follow and read, nor their authors. Sometimes I think I follow too many of them, read them too rarely, which means I still haven’t formed a proper connection with them. Perhaps that will happen in the future, when I focus more on filtering out the noise in favour of those with a high signal-to-noise ratio.
And perhaps that’s exactly the point. Every now and then, I come across a blog in my feed that I’d forgotten about. Why? Because updates are posted so rarely. It’s like walking through a garden where, every now and then, new, unfamiliar flowers appear.