Feed Me

The RSS feed is undoubtedly one of the best innovations in the relatively short history of the web. By boiling down all or part of a site’s content into a simple, portable format that readers can subscribe to, a site’s updates come to the reader, rather than the reader having to make a consistent stream of visits to keep up with the site.

Throughout the past few years, I have used or tried out Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, NetVibes, NewsHutch (defunct), and FeedLounge (defunct) before finally settling on Google Reader as my feed reader of choice. Google’s product started off as an awful mess that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, but has progressed into probably the best web-based feed reader available. I say that because of it’s easy-to-use interface, Firefox integration, and the integration with the Google suite of products that make it easy to access.

My own feed reading activities have progressed to the point where I’m somewhat of a feed junkie – although probably nowhere near the level of the truly tech-obsessed. In a typical week, I cover a few thousand entries across my feed subscriptions. A fairly low percentage are actually interesting to me (as you can see, I’ve only read about 600 entries in a month).

Over the past few months, I’ve become a disciple of the “read feeds in batches” school of thought. Feed reading can waste a lot of productive time if it’s done frequently, but if I can wake up early on the weekend and plow through a thousand feeds while I drink coffee, I think that’s a productive use of my time. Granted, some items are fairly old (in web time) by then, but there are few things in feeds that need to be known or acted upon the same day.

If you’re a Google Reader user, check out the “Trends” link in the left sidebar. The statistics are interesting, and in the case of the “Inactive” Subscriptions trends tab, useful. I monitor this tab to see when it’s time to unsubscribe from a feed because it’s no longer producing any useful updates within a 3- to 6-month timeframe. You can also use the “% Read” statistic to see if there are feeds that are no longer of interest and just eat up time. Anything below 10-33% is probably not worth continuing to read – depending on the number of site updates.

I hope to see a few more of you subscribing to my feeds!

Of Interest: 4/26-5/2

It was a very slow news week this week – at least as far as anything I found interesting. So here you have my “link of the week”:

Zeldman on the Vanishing Personal Site

Bloggers are now outsourcing. Photos go to Flickr, short bits to Twitter, links to Del.icio.us or other services, and it affects how centralized our experience is for our readers. I’m a fan of the all-in-one site, but I don’t post a lot of non-text content at this point, so we’ll see if I can put up with the “pain” of developing my own services when I get to that point!