RSS Feed Overload

Published 4 years, 1 month ago in publishing + content

I’ve got a lot of RSS feeds (518) in NetNewsWire. I’ve got so many RSS feeds in NNW that it’s made reading RSS feeds unbearable lately… you see, I only open NNW once a day (usually around 10:00 at night) and try to read all of my feeds before I doze off at night… but, I’ve got so many feeds in NNW right now, that it’s just not fun anymore, and I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by all of the stuff I have to read each night.

It’s gotten so bad that I’m just not reading most of the stuff anymore, just skimming the headlines and skipping ahead to the next feed, ad nauseum…

I’ve stayed subscribed to a lot of RSS feeds because I guess I’ve felt that I might miss something if I don’t keep them in my aggregator, that I might miss something… but this past week, I realized that there’s no reason to have 1900 unread items in your aggregator, if you’re never going to actually read them.

So, this week, I’ll be cleaning out RSS feeds that I’m no longer reading… this will likely include a lot of the “a-list” bloggers that I just don’t feel like I connect with directly.

I do however have a solution that’ll make sure I don’t miss out on anything that should interest me from those folks: I’ve set up a good 10 or so keyword search feeds from Feedster.com, so, if something does get posted by one of the blogs or other RSS feeds I currently have subscribed, I won’t miss anything after I unsubscribe from those feeds. I’m also staying subscribed to Scoble’s aggregator-feed, as he’ll likely catch the important stuff for me. (Thanks Robert, in advance for that feed).

Hopefully, this simplification of my RSS feeds will help me slowly return to more regular postings of my own.

5 Responses to “RSS Feed Overload”

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1 Peter Opper Jul 17th, 2004 at 6:33 pm

You should give that PulpFiction a try. Label your feeds, filter them into folders, and view them in a priority or something like that. I can get through my feeds 2x faster than I can with other apps with this.

P.S. Get the betas. 1.0 was pretty much a dog, but 1.0.1 kicks ass and it’s nearly final. Wednesday I think? I IMed the developer last week.
2 Jonathan Greene Jul 17th, 2004 at 7:50 pm

I hear you… at the moment I am subscribed to 579 feeds and have 7198 unread items. It’s impossible to even consider reading it all.

I go through the blogs I want to read (my NNW is broken into groups of interest or source) and then scan or just mark as read things like the NYT, Yahoo or BBC, since they generate so many.

It’s still way too many, but I am definitely feeling it hard to delete them. Perhaps as more smart feed functions come about, it will be easier to kill the actual posts and just track purely on interest — though that’s how you miss those random nuggets.
3 Chris ODonnell Jul 17th, 2004 at 9:48 pm

I was over 300 feeds at one time - I’ve got it down to a manageable 150, and only a couple of them are prolific A list bloggers. Let’s face, many of the A list bloggers have reputations that far exceed the quality of their output anyway. I’ve realized I’m not really missing anything if I’m not up to date on who is mad a Dave Winer this week, and that most of the information I thought I couldn’t do without…I can do without.
4 Robert Scoble Jul 18th, 2004 at 1:48 am

Thanks! I’m glad someone likes the link blog. I try to catch the interesting stuff for it.