RSS Fatigue

I started to get RSS Fatigue at the end of summer ’07 and knew I needed to do something about it. I’ve had some pretty good RSS management strategies and I was using Newsgator which fit my reading style. I had my feeds setup into folders based on content and priority. I had one group for VC bloggers, a tech group with subgroups for gadgets and such. Everything was going fine and I was able to keep on top of my rss feed reading. Then I started to fall behind.

The first thing I did was try to purge a few feeds. I tossed Gizmodo for Engadget mainly because they had very similar articles and I used a feed combiner for Engadget and EngadgetMobile feeds to eliminate dups. That made things better for a bit but I think there has been an increase in the number of posts per blog and I was wasting time on articles about the same thing. Every blog seemed to have posts like this, "How [iphone/facebook/google thing] affected the industry this blog is about.". Even feeds that weren’t gadget or mobile related had a few posts about the iphone.

One thing I didn’t try was to filter my rss feeds. I really didn’t feel like that was the solution for me since I thought that I might miss something. I could handle not reading some of the less important posts later but I didn’t think most blogs have or would put out two feeds one for important articles and the other for filler articles. I also didn’t stop reading my feeds as some have suggested.

Then it hit me one day that looking at the articles feed by feed was the problem. I needed a different way to organize them and put them in front of me so that the important stuff to me and the biggest news items bubble up to the top. So I built myself a feed reader and a database to store them in. Then I attached it to another project I was working on to manage my mp3 and picture collection. First thing I did was build a duplicate of Newsgator since that was what I had been using, I figured that was a good place to start.

Not an exact duplicate of Newsgator but it was a start.