RSS is a big deal, as anyone who's subscribed to even a few feeds probably knows. Once you get past just a few feeds, though, it can quickly get overwhelming. RSS can leave you feeling inadequate, brain-dead and uninspired.
I was feeling frustrated yesterday when switching from one feed reader to another on a new computer. Then I remembered how wonderful RSS really is - and I decided to write this post. I hope you'll find it interesting and useful.
Seven tips for making the most of your RSS reader, from simple to more complex.
I'm a big believer in subscribing to anything that looks of interest. Read what you can and don't worry about the rest. The chances that you'll see something worthwhile in a feed are far, far higher if you've subscribed to it than they would have been if you hadn't.
The world of the web is a raging river; any fear you have of sticking your toe in a big, fast current is no reason to spend all your time in a tiny stream instead, in hopes perhaps that you can drink all the water.
I don't know why people feel obligated to read every item in every feed they've subscribed to. Get over that and you'll already be a far happier person. Many people say they find relief knowing that with enough subscriptions, anything important that they missed will come up again later. Other people oversubscribe and then just read "watchlists" - searches for keywords inside their subscribed feeds. Some feed readers make this easy.
Some feed readers require that you click through all of one feed's items at a time. Others allow you to see whatever individual items are most recent, regardless of what source feed they came from. This is the prefered method of most news bloggers - but it could serve you well too.
There's no way to read every item in every feed you've subscribed to, so after reading what's most important - try switching to what's most recent!
Try reading those items in order of appearance, until you don't want to read them any more. Then stop. Maybe mark all as ready, maybe don't worry about it. Life's too short to worry about it, aren't you glad you read what you were able to find the time to read?
Some feeds are really important and are best read outside of the bulky environment of a feed reader. Try starting a Netvibes, Pageflakes or iGoogle page for the feeds you want to be able to quickly check out throughout the day. Drag the link from your address bar to your browser's toolbar and shapow - you've got a one-click way to check a handful of your most important feeds for updates.
If you haven't used one of these services before, here's a link to try out a Netvibes page I created to display some top sources in the Open Data movement.
By most indications, Google Reader is the most popular RSS reader on the market and Bloglines is a close second. There are many reasons to try out a desktop reader like NetNewsWire, FeedDemon or Vienna. The picture below is of the desktop reader I've been using lately, Attensa for Mac. It's not as functional as NetNewsWire, and it's not as pretty as NewsFire, but it's quite stable. There are many, many different feed readers that do many different things. BlogBridge, for example, just released a feature that lets you filter between "positive" and "negative" articles by sentiment!
Sharing items helps make your feed reading more meaningful and thus easier to do. If you know that people have subscribed to your shared items feed, then it makes even more sense to open up that feed reader and continue supplying the fruits of your good taste.
Google Reader has a popular shared-items feed, but it's not easy to control and if you stop using Google Reader then you lose your items and social connections. If instead you offer people a FeedBurner feed of shared items, you can plug any RSS feed in as the source for that feed. Bookmark items "toshare" in Del.icio.us and grab the RSS that tag in your account produces - publish that through Feedburner and you can know how many people have subscribed. Then, if you stop using del.icio.us and switch to Ma.gnolia - you can just change your source feed of shared items without changing the ultimate Feedburner feed and losing your subscribers.
Above is a shot of my blog and shared items feed, spliced together using a third party service called FeedDigest. Knowing that people want to read what I bookmark motivates me to read feeds and to open my bookmarking service.
OPML, or Outline Processor Markup Language, is a really simple file format that's the standard way to move bundles of RSS feeds around. If you use an RSS reader, you've already got an OPML file! Using OPML you can:
Want to try out an OPML file? Here's one: the RWW Best Feeds on Data Visualization, from our Toolkit for Key Issues of 2008. You can download the file and try importing it into your feed reader, or preview it live below using Grazr
Here's what the import/export screen looks like for Google Reader, it's under the settings tab.
The second best thing about RSS, after convenience, is its flexibility. There are so many different ways you can use RSS feeds. Here are a few of my favorites, try experimenting and you'll get more out of the medium.
It's easy to get discouraged with RSS. Trying out new things will help you discover new, magical experiences, though. Letting go of the stress caused by any obligation to read everything will go a long way.
Have a good time with this exciting medium and let us know in comments what your favorite methods for making the most of RSS are.
Little guy reading feeds icon at the top of this post from FastIcon
Comments
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I recently started using http://www.shyftr.com for feed reading. It is similar to fav.or.it, but more demanding geeks will prefer shyftr. I am trying to take as many tasks off of my desktop as possible, so I can access as much as possible, from as many places as possible, without needing my computer. It's also one less thing to worry about backing up in case of hard drive failure. Google Reader is also nice, I use that for the feeds I subscribe to from the blogs of my Twitterbuds.
I'm curious what other online feed readers people prefer.
Twitter @thattalldude
Posted by: Shawn K | April 10, 2008 4:28 PM
Shawn, there are lots of really cool web RSS readers being built these days, but I find them all a little too slow for rapid scanning. Love the feature sets, though. I haven't seen the one you linked to here, thanks!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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April 10, 2008 4:34 PM
Nice post, but I'd say this is 7 tips for people unfamiliar with RSS or something along those lines.
You bring up a lot of good points, but I've been using RSS heavily for work for some time now and while I do oversubscribe and use river of news, etc I've found that neither are conducive to efficient use. I'd say that if you don't want to get caught in your RSS reader for an hour every time you log in you should try to skip the river view and focus in on the topics that are important to you at the moment. Even when casual reading I find that I like to move from one topic to the next.
As for oversubscribing, it's fine, because RSS is still the best way to stay on top of the news that is important to you, but if you are the type of people who just can hit that "mark all as read" button than RSS can be a time killer. I would say oversubscribe, but one you reach a point where you are starting to get burned out, try to cut it down- maybe kill two ones you don't like for every one you add. This probably won't happen until you are over 50 or 100 feeds, but it depends on what/who you read.
As number 8 I'd also add in that mobile RSS reading is a great way to keep up on news when away from the office or to burn a few minutes. Google Reader's mobile version is not bad and there are a few other services that can let you get some serious reading done without going through a lot of trouble.
Posted by: Sal Cangeloso | April 10, 2008 5:22 PM
I went a bit crazy and built my own feed reader. I totally oversubscribe to blogs with 300 currently with 3000 unread articles. I still get all the important stuff to me because I turn post categories to tags and weight the most important ones so articles tagged with it bubble up to the top.
I never liked the river of news style much but that's just personal preference. To me reading that way jumps topics more then I like and after the 4th post about some IPhone minutia all the other posts start to feel like i'm reading the same thing over and over.
I'd love to use Toluu sounds like a great service.
Posted by: Shawn McCollum | April 10, 2008 5:51 PM
All these are great tips - if the only thing you do all day is read news in your feed reader.
Honestly, there is SO much information out there that I'd rather cut out feeds and services rather than add new ones like this article suggests.
Oversubscribe? Are you kidding me? I generally try to subscribe only to the major hubs because they usually link out to the good articles from the smaller sites anyway.
In a world of information overload, I want less rather than more.
Posted by: Gyutae Park | April 10, 2008 6:33 PM
Great comments everybody, keep 'em coming!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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April 10, 2008 6:57 PM
I agree with Sal - most folks are just getting started in RSS, and much of this excellent post is probably over their heads...
This is one of the best, most complete set of tips for RSS lovers that I've seen.
I think it should be flagged over at the enterprise RSS day of action wiki as a great launchpad for discussion on April 24.
Thank you, Marshall.
Posted by: Janet Johnson | April 10, 2008 7:32 PM
Thanks Marshall. I just started out with Google Reader and following RSS feeds for the first time, this helped me get up to speed more quickly. It can be an overwhelming flow of information especially if you are one of those who likes to have a "zero inbox."
Frankly I'd love a better UI to get through this and wish I had disposable cash to commission a usability study on how different personas use these tools. It seems ripe for something simpler but I'm new and just need to get over it.
Thanks again for the post!
Posted by: Adam Cohen | April 10, 2008 7:43 PM
Great list of tips! One that I just started using is http://www.feedables.com/ They aggregate many feeds into a single viewable page or you can also subscribe to their feeds. I actually picked this story out of http://ria.feedables.com/
Dan
Posted by: dan | April 10, 2008 8:03 PM
These are great ideas!
I've used Google Reader for over a year now - it's open whenever I'm online, which is most of every day. My now-searchable starred & tagged items have become a wonderful resource. I'm not a blogger and don't use RSS for work, so like Gyutae Park I do try to keep the pressure turned down on that firehose, even with mashing "Mark As Read". The "river" doesn't work for me because some feed items are always long reads and some are just headlines.
I use a combo of custom Yahoo pipes and a simple rule: if I don't star anything in a feed for a week or so, I unsubscribe and bookmark that site in del.icio.us. I check that blog collection if I run out of things to read in GR. I think of the blogs I do follow as a form of smart (human!) filtering, and I'm experimenting with StumbleUpon to that end as well... FeedEachOther (or Ma.gnolia?) is probably better for this, but the FEO community is just getting started. FEO really embodies Marshall's idea of skimming and not worrying if you miss something...
Posted by: JS | April 10, 2008 10:50 PM
The best desktop client for me until now is Mindity - http://www.mindity.com/WhatIs.aspx
It's light-weight and with some social functions
Posted by: Robert Tilake | April 11, 2008 1:18 AM
Something like Quazion might also help...
Posted by: Venkat | April 11, 2008 2:00 AM
Something like Quazion might help
Posted by: Venkat | April 11, 2008 2:01 AM
Great list of tips. I'm wondering if i'll make a website based on rss feeds, just to add rss's from tomes of websites who offer rss to an simple website.
Or another question: I have a website and i want to reate that xml to give to the others some short news about my website ( http://www.site-aanmelden.com/kunst/muziek/index3.php ).
So how can i creat it for all of my categories?
10q. Ssaoes.
Posted by: Site Aanmelden | April 11, 2008 2:40 AM
Good work Marshall. This is an article that I will definitely link to from my site. I use a few readers (bloglines, google, netnewswire) depending on the subject (work versus personal feeds). I am really loving the feature on google reader which creates a public page for each tag. This allows me to collect feeds on a particular topic (e.g., child and adolescent mental health), then share the page (and hence the posts) with colleagues from work. I agree that desktop readers give a quicker service, but there is something great about being able to log-in from any computer and get my news!!
Posted by: Gareth | April 11, 2008 4:13 AM
I've found that using Idea Shower (http://www.ideashower.com/) saves me a lot of time. You can mark pages to "read later" and then come back to them when you have time. Try it...you'll like it.
Posted by: Judith Siess | April 11, 2008 5:01 AM
In regards to Toluu, if anyone wants an invite or to learn a little more about it check out this interview with the founder: http://knightknetwork.com/2008/04/11/interview-toluu-founder-caleb-elston/
Leave a comment and we'll get you an invite!
Posted by: David Knight | April 11, 2008 5:36 AM
I've been using NetNewsWire for a while now, and I have to say that the great thing about a desktop app is I only read the bulk of my feeds when I'm at my work computer. The only portable feeds I use are the most important ones - friends, family.
Information overload comes quickly and burning out on it sucks. I love your analogy of the 'river of news' - in fact, that's how I see much of my Internet use. Twitter, Facebook, etc. Each time I get into any of those, I just skim around and pick up the nuggets that I catch my eye, always knowing that if I miss anything, well, I'm not really missing anything. The world goes on. Mark as read and go get lunch.
Posted by: Mark Schoneveld | April 11, 2008 7:33 AM
I like the newspaper-style layout of PopURLS. I find "unread" counts oppressive, even if I can "mark all as read". The newspaper style is also a nice river-of-news style of reading.
I used FeedRaider for a while, but it had responsiveness issues. No worse than Google Reader, but just as annoying. I realized that I don't need to see the absolutely latest post as much as I need to be able to scan a lot of feeds at once.
So I created my own feed reader using SimplePie. Someday I'd like to release it as open-source, but currently it's very rough around the edges. It's fine for my own personal use, but I'd be embarrassed to release it for general consumption.
I also use Google Reader to scan a large number of feeds for my blog.
Posted by: phil.gs | April 11, 2008 8:54 AM
Good info - For a totally different RSS-based option, you might check out PimpMyNews.com
Basically, it's a newsreader that *talks*, with social news & sharing functionality.
It scans the web's top 1,000+ blogs and converts breaking stories to audio. You can listen on your computer, or on-the-go on an iPhone, iPod or any MP3 player.
It's great for catching up on blogs by listening to them while doing other things, like driving, working out, etc.
It's free to sign up and personalize an account.
Full site: http://www.PimpMyNews.com
iPhone/iTouch site: http://www.PimpMyNews.com/m
Disclosure: a friend and I built it.
Posted by: John Atkinson | April 11, 2008 11:14 AM
Very informative article on RSS feeds. I will share the link on the OEN blog so that entrepreneurs can get these tips. I think this will be a tremendous resource for leaders of start up organizations.
Thanks for presenting this information.
Posted by: Sarena Regazzoni | April 11, 2008 2:19 PM
Some great tips! I'm also glad you started out with a tip related to how we approach RSS ("I don't know why people feel obligated to read every item in every feed they've subscribed to. Get over that and you'll already be a far happier person.") - RSS can be no better than email if we abuse it. I've blogged about "Being Ruthless" with RSS in the past http://chieftech.blogspot.com/2007/09/being-ruthless.html
However, I would expand you tip about using multiple services to include using multiple devices. What I like about services like Google Reader and Bloglines is they offer both a full Web client and a reduce mobile client. I read RSS on different devices, but I don't want to read the same feed twice. I also use services like Yahoo! Pipes to mashup feeds in smart ways.
This is actually one of the reasons I'm so interested in Enterprise RSS and kicked off the idea of an Enterprise RSS Day of Action http://enterpriserssdayofaction.wikispaces.com/ on the 24th April.
From this perspective, while a lot of your tips are great, they don't work inside the firewall if you want to consume internal and external RSS feeds at the same time, mashed up as appropriate, a consumed on different devices and in a way where you only read a feed once. But its not your tips... enterprise users need to agitate for better RSS support inside their organizations to get the RSS reading experience they deserve.
Posted by: James "Enterprise RSS Day of Action" Dellow | April 11, 2008 3:08 PM
We just launched a new RSS aggregator site called FeedZero (http://www.feedzero.com).
It's uses Bayesian filtering (the same technology used in many anti-spam systems) to help you stay on top of the things you find interesting - by simply marking items as "like" or "don't like", the site builds a profile of your interests and filters incoming items accordingly.
Here's a screenshot showing an example - a filtered view of Digg's RSS feed: http://trog.qgl.org/up/fzero1.jpg
We're still working on the interface and are currently trying to get feedback, so please feel free to drop by and give it a go.
Posted by: David Harrison | April 11, 2008 11:58 PM
I'm soo with you.
You guys could just bring all the interesting posts at www.tectrnd.com together. that's why i actually launched tectrnd.com.
hope you like it
best regards
Vincent
Posted by: Vincent Nicolai | April 12, 2008 5:13 AM
I was subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds at one time, but then I realized that I was only getting interesting stories from about 100 of them.
Why would I stay subscribed to 200-300 feeds that give me no content when I could read all of the items from the 100 RSS feeds that I actually get content from?
Posted by: Michael | April 12, 2008 12:03 PM
@Michael: I'm guessing that comment is directed at me, but not sure - in any case, here's a quick response:
Often there's a few feeds that I read where either some or most of the content is of interest to me. However, there's a few things they post that I could not care less about.
FeedZero was born out of an idea to filter out those few posts in a feed you don't care about. That way its trivial to stay subscribed to as many feeds as you want, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much improved.
(Just for interest, there were two main blogs that were primarily responsible - Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo, who often posts great technical stuff but also posts some boring things, and Bruce Schneier, whose occasional posts about squid get in the way of what is an excellent security resource :)
Posted by: David Harrison | April 12, 2008 4:56 PM
SharedCopy.com has a "read-later" feature that stash complete webpages into a feed.
Perfect for offline reading (desktop reader) or simply to consume what interested you through out the day in a "river of news" fashion via google reader.
Posted by: choonkeat | April 13, 2008 9:33 AM
I've found that the best way to go through feeds faster is with folders, dividing feeds into multiple topics like News, Apple, Blogging, and so on.
Then when I read the feeds I do so a folder at a time. Having an overall context helps more article headlines "make sense", and I know that the items in some folders (Miscellaneous) can just be skimmed while other folders need more attention.
Posted by: Michael Long | April 13, 2008 10:12 AM
Great Article Marshall..
I have been seeing a lot of people say "bin the feeds you don't read"... I don't agree. It just needs a little organisation. Using Google Reader, I tag every feed twice - Work / Primary / Secondary / Tertiary , and a label to the type of category it fits best. Always keep up to date on Work, and I find I am reading my friends Shared items a lot these days too..
Why don't I bin the feeds? Well, if I am looking for something online I first search Google, then its a search of del.icio.us and google reader. Normally find everything I need then!
"From your 489 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 10,011 items, starred 546 items, shared 28 items, and emailed 28 items"
Posted by: Jez | April 13, 2008 11:26 AM
I've been looking for a way to filter my feeds without needing to give up on my current feed reader. I couldn't find anything out there that would do the job. So I made my own.
You give it the URL of a feed and then it will create a new version of the feed, and will insert a small rating box into each post. Just subscribe to this new feed URL and start reading. If you see a post you don't like then click on the link in that post and the filter will be updated to remove similar posts in the future. Note that there is a bit of a training period before the filtering kicks in.
If you want to take a look, you can find it at www.rssninja.com.
I'm still playing around to optimize the accuracy, but it's already pretty good.
Posted by: RSS Ninja | April 13, 2008 2:52 PM
What I really, really like about blogbridge is their keywords feature. I'm able to add keywords that I look for in articles (words that mean something to me) and then those words are highlighted throughout my feeds.
This is EXCELLENT for quickly looking for items on topics that YOU want to read about.
Posted by: devnet | April 14, 2008 8:44 AM
Great Advice! Thanks!
Posted by: Dave Lucas | April 14, 2008 1:34 PM
For those that want to keep track of their favourite feeds on the move, give mippin a try. Just enter mippin.com into your mobile browser. Integration with your existing desktop readers coming soon.
Posted by: Scott | April 15, 2008 8:30 AM
Thanks for the tips....I will bear them in my mind!
http://zia.blogspot.com/2008/03/web-surfing-how-i-overcame-information.html
Posted by: Zia | April 15, 2008 12:53 PM
Marshall, you forgot to mention FeedHub.
Once you've subscribed to a gazillion feeds -- as we both have -- FeedHub gives you a few options in how to best manage the feeds. It's essential. I can't imagine life without it.
http://www.feedhub.com
Takes a little while for it to learn your preferences, but it's also a reflection of how often you're willing to teach it.
With FeedHub, you can prioritize by best and average sources, memes (this is invaluable), discarding only the "junk," receiving only the "best," limiting to a certain number of posts per day (let's say 50 or 100). It's great!! I have SEVERAL FeedHub accounts and swear by it.
Cheers,
- David Scott Lewis
Posted by: David Scott Lewis | April 15, 2008 1:08 PM
... and I forgot to mention my preferred desktop client, Omea Pro. I've tried the others; Omea Pro (or Omea Reader) is better than the other desktop clients -- by far. (FTR, I try many/most desktop clients.)
The only downside with Omea (either Pro or Reader): Not so good for sharing (i.e., social bookmarking). However, this is a problem for many desktop readers.
Posted by: David Scott Lewis | April 15, 2008 1:13 PM
I'm using my own application - Context Organizer - to summarize my reading material. When at a click of a button I see the keywords and the most important sentences - that helps me to quickly decide how useful the information is. Summarization helps with finding specific information in a sea of disparate content and is critical in quickly focusing on the most relevant information.
Posted by: Henry Lewkowicz | April 15, 2008 11:16 PM
I agree that trying to manage 1000 feeds can be a challenge. And while I like the idea of oversubscribing -- and psychologically trying to live with not reading 100% of the articles -- this still leaves me without a way to manage the overload and clutter.
As a result we built bscopes to help find the connections in the blogosphere. Rather than different variations on text and reading, we are focusing on a way to visualize blogs and their relationships through pictures.
We are in the early stages of our effort and would love feedback from other bloggers who are trying to manage a ton of feeds every day.
Posted by: Brad Balfour | April 16, 2008 5:27 AM
umm thank you ;)
www.aybardumlu.com
Posted by: Hakan | April 18, 2008 12:17 AM
Great tips - if the only thing you do all day is read news in your feed reader.There are so may great RSS feeds and information, but so little time.It´s impossible to keep up with everything.
Posted by: Tom At The Home Business Archive | April 18, 2008 3:37 AM
Have used Google reader all along, and now have gotten used to it. I even used Outlook for reading feeds. Pimpmynews is nice. So is Bloglines - for people who are getting into this for the first time.
-Des
http://feeds.feedburner.com/techpit
Posted by: Technology Watch | April 27, 2008 8:22 PM
Another way to save time...
I use Idea Shower (http://www.ideashower.com/ideas/active/read-it-later/), a free plug-in for Firefox, to mark pages to read later. It's like bookmarking, but keeps the list right on the tool bar and is easier to delete the entries.
If there is a post that I don't have time to read right now, I just mark it "read it later" and then delete it from Google Reader. I can come back to it any time by clicking on on "reading list" on my tool bar.
I love it!
(I also use it when shopping online for marking things that I want to order later or just compare.)
Posted by: Judith Siess | May 2, 2008 4:45 AM
I tend to crank through RSS feeds with my BlackBerry every morning. Google Reader has a mobile site and there are plenty of RSS reader applications for your Blackberry. Check out my reviews http://ttrumble.com/blackberry-rss-feed-readers-reviewed/
Posted by: Thomas | May 5, 2008 3:02 PM
Great idea.
Regards http://ooyes.net
Posted by: website design | May 6, 2008 5:49 AM