I wrote in the past that Google Reader is my window into the internet, and that I read quite a lot of blogs. I've been thinking for some time to post about my way of managing all this information, and I just got a good excuse - Moshe blogged today about his struggle to handle the amount of information he is getting via RSS feeds.
First of all I must agree that Outlook is a lousy RSS reader, though I use it at work to subscribe to numerous feeds. Google Reader is not only a much better application, it has two important properties that are derived from it being a centralized web application -
- First of all, it's on the web - I can access it from anywhere, and I will never loose anything as long as I remember my password (assuming Google will live forever...)
- Second, since many people are subscribed to the same feeds, Google now has a few years worth of cached RSS feeds. When I subscribe to new a blog - Reader shows me all of it's historic posts a few years back.
The second bullet is quite important, since most good blogs have a long history of great posts - that's how they became good blogs in the first place. Two examples of excellent blogs who's value is in the archive are blogs by Kathy Sierra (which stopped blogging two years ago) and Joel Spolsky (who keeps blogging but said little of interest in the last couple of years). It took me some time, but I read most of their historic posts, and they are worth their weight in.. emm... golden electrons.
So, to the issue of feed management - I organize the feeds into groups (labels/folders) by topic and importance, but they roughly divided into two categories - I shall call them "read-or-die" and a "pile-for-later".
The first group (the numbered feeds in the picture) are feeds which should be read, ignored or marked for reading (tagged toread in delicious) at some undefined future (and perhaps never). Nothing unread in those folders is more than two days old. I usually go through the shared items and the first four folders, and use "list view" to run through the rest of them, just looking at the titles and reading only once in a while:
The second group is mostly low volume, for specific topics I am interested in. It simply piles up until I have some time to read them all. Actually, if you have the time to read this post - stop reading and choose a random video on TED.com. It's a good one - see it and you'll experience something new or interesting (those conferences are some 4000 USD if you want a seat). You have my permission to stop reading this and see a video from TED instead.
Another cool feature Reader offers is "trends" - you can look at your reading behavior over time (although I don't know if I can see more than 30 days back). Here are my stats for today:
"Read" means only that I looked at the title - nothing more. I actually read only a small fraction of them. As you can see I only share about 0.8% percent of the posts I saw, those that I think will be interesting to people reading my shared posts feed. Herein lies one of the most important advice I have for finding a source of relevant information - find people whose ideas are interesting to you (rather than some news aggregation site), and they will be your ultimate filters of information.
Usually I'm adding and removing at least a blog or two every month, trying to balance the time I have to spend reading a blog versus how interesting is it's content. My recent addition is the blog of James Hamilton, a data center architect who recently moved from Microsoft to Amazon.
Also based on Reader trends, you can see I'm not much of a day person if you didn't know that already:
Anyway, that was my way of handling information overload these days. What's yours?
So, to the issue of feed management - I organize the feeds into groups (labels/folders) by topic and importance, but they roughly divided into two categories - I shall call them "read-or-die" and a "pile-for-later".
The first group (the numbered feeds in the picture) are feeds which should be read, ignored or marked for reading (tagged toread in delicious) at some undefined future (and perhaps never). Nothing unread in those folders is more than two days old. I usually go through the shared items and the first four folders, and use "list view" to run through the rest of them, just looking at the titles and reading only once in a while:
The second group is mostly low volume, for specific topics I am interested in. It simply piles up until I have some time to read them all. Actually, if you have the time to read this post - stop reading and choose a random video on TED.com. It's a good one - see it and you'll experience something new or interesting (those conferences are some 4000 USD if you want a seat). You have my permission to stop reading this and see a video from TED instead.
Another cool feature Reader offers is "trends" - you can look at your reading behavior over time (although I don't know if I can see more than 30 days back). Here are my stats for today:
"Read" means only that I looked at the title - nothing more. I actually read only a small fraction of them. As you can see I only share about 0.8% percent of the posts I saw, those that I think will be interesting to people reading my shared posts feed. Herein lies one of the most important advice I have for finding a source of relevant information - find people whose ideas are interesting to you (rather than some news aggregation site), and they will be your ultimate filters of information.Usually I'm adding and removing at least a blog or two every month, trying to balance the time I have to spend reading a blog versus how interesting is it's content. My recent addition is the blog of James Hamilton, a data center architect who recently moved from Microsoft to Amazon.
Also based on Reader trends, you can see I'm not much of a day person if you didn't know that already:
Anyway, that was my way of handling information overload these days. What's yours? 