How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Feed Reader ☀
It got me thinking about my subscriptions and how they’ve changed over time. Recently I’ve found myself cutting subscriptions and am now down to less than 50, and of those, 25 are for ‘things’ and not people; monitoring the health of some of my systems, the children’s school, Tae Kwon Do school, etc. The more interesting part to me is that after filtering them down several times I refined the criteria for feeds I would put in my ‘people’ grouping on Google Reader to technical people that I respect, but ones that don’t blog too much, and not ones I will hear about anyway. They have to sit in a middle ground. For example, it appears that anything written by Steve Yegge or Joel Spolsky will become so wildly popular that I have no chance of missing it, no matter how hard I try. With them it’s redundant to have them in my subscription list. On the other end of the spectrum there are people that post too infrequently, who I have to scratch my head and try to remember who they are and why I was subscribed to their feed in the first place. Out they go. From the group that survives I also throw out anyone I already follow on FriendFeed.
Contrast this with the days when my subscription list would regularly peak at 200 and I would have to trim it back.
I reckon many of you aghast over my feed reader subscription tally:
For a total of less than 50 I don’t see the appeal of even using a feed reader. Really nothing other than push notifications that could be served via email, Twitter or Tumblr even. On a good broadband connection, several rounds loading up a dozen pages would even suffice.
As I’ve previously written, my engagement with RSS feeds differs from how others tackle them. It’s a stream I skim and wade in, as opposed to a buffet where every item must be consumed and 0 unread count is the overarching goal. Instead, I’m prospecting for gems, my finely honed web eye tuned for spotting the numinous tidings in the vast sea of mundane bits. Google Reader’s “starred items” queue serves not as a “favorites” list, but as a “I’ll explore this in more detail and/or read later” pile.
Why so many feeds? Because the high prize treasure is buried in the long tail. Sure, the good stuff often bubbles up into the popular site feeds, but not always. The eclectic, insightful bits I enjoy seem to be scattered over those blogs and web outlets with small readership. In fact, I have pruned most of the big time frequently visited feed providers. As just a casual glance at Twitter can tell me all I need to be aware about the latest Michael Jackson, Apple scuttlebutt or political “he said, she said” outrage du jour. But there’s a delightful trove of reading to be discovered amongst hundreds of one-off blogs.
Why RSS at all?
- Timestamping of new web pages. It is quickly apparent, and grows thornier with each passing year, how un-chronological searching and sifting the web is. RSS permits you to read in date order. When searching, it’s a colossal riddle to puzzle together a sequence from relevance ordered entries, when it many instances, the create date is of great importance also.
- Structured markup. The dream of the semantic web has not materialized as prophesied. In my first encounters with RSS, I recall vainly searching for directories of RSS feeds, and stunned at the dearth, expecting that the structured nature of RSS naturally result in repositories of directories. Early on, this was thwarted as many web sites (especially those of the legacy brick and mortal variety) dissuaded RSS consumption, because it was perceived to take surfer eyeballs away from the “main” site. It’s sure seems like folly today, but I distinctly remember reluctance of many a news provider to embrace RSS. It wasn’t until the explosion of blogs where RSS feeds became a web standard.
- Search filtering. For limiting to recently added items. A far superior search than Google News, which is laden with subscription walls, PR releases and ridiculous redundancy.
- Newspaper replacement. For me, RSS feeds have totally supplanted the daily newspaper. The days of home delivery or popping quarters into vending box are just a faint memory now.
That said, I have a love/hate relationship with RSS, especially with the reader software. Far back, at the dawn of the 21st century, I crafted my own reader, a crude manifestation where I added feed URLs to a hidden Linux text file to configure. Since then, I’ve experimented with just about all of the RSS software offerings, both client and web applications, and deemed them to be feature crippled and/or woefully defective. My excursions with desktop software all ended abruptly or horrendously; some programs simply strained after 100 feeds where others made my machine cough and smoke, attempting to churn through hundreds of entries. And search times were measured in minutes, not seconds.
Google Reader wins (at least circa 2009) mainly because of search (an inherent Google advantage in any “web” application) but also because it hasn’t yet choked at the volume of feeds I’ve given it (thus far). I am astounded, however, that the brilliant developers at Google have not capitalized on their search prowess to make the Google Reader the ultimate uber-newsreader. To the contrary, their efforts have been directed at replicating features like friend sharing and tags better served by other online fiefdoms like Delicious and Twitter. Why not leverage the huge comparative advantage in search to perform trending matches on keywords in your feeds to popular rising feeds which you are not a subscriber of yet.
How much time do I spend trawling through Google Reader entries? Depending upon state of work and other real life pursuits, anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour in the morning and perhaps another half hour (or more depending on how distracted I am working with other interweb affairs) the rest of the day.
Finally, for the curious, here is my Google Reader reading trend chart:
