Confessions of an RSS Junkie

I can’t imagine how I functioned before RSS feeds.

I’m in no hurry to find a seven step program, because this addiction saves me time, keeps me informed, and entertained.

The closest thing I can compare it to is working in a newsroom, where I had access to news feeds from a variety of sources. All that’s missing is the teletype clattering in the background (now I’m really dating myself).

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, or haven’t ever used one, Wired news has a really helpful article out about RSS and how its going to become much more well known thanks to Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. It’s really due to Internet Explorer 7 which is bundled with Vista – it sports a built in RSS reader. The Wired article is a nice primer on getting started, if you’ve been hesitant, give it a whirl.

Google Reader is getting loads of great comments from RSS junkies everywhere.

Me, my RSS tool of choice is NetNewsWire on the Mac and from the same people, Feed Demon for the PC. Outstanding.

4 thoughts on “Confessions of an RSS Junkie”

  1. If you’re onto the confessions theme here, it’s time we find out how many feeds you subscribe to and how many unread posts you currently have awaiting you.

  2. hey, good questions.

    I moderate comments daily – i haven’t found any better way to keep the spam out, even though Akismet gets 99% of it, there’s still link trash that shows up daily.

    Re my feeds. I subscribe to 453 feeds, but this number moves up and down by 10 or so as I weed out stuff I don’t read and find new stuff. I go through a pretty quick headline scan (I use NetNewsWire in 3 pane mode) and though there are generally 3 or 4 thousand posts a day I’ll only read about 150 of those. There’s a lot of overlap particularly from the news sites.

    If you want to do a little OPML fun head over to Share Your OPML http://share.opml.org and see how much we have (if anything) in common.

    Here are the top 10 people with feeds most like mine (or, is it mine are most like their’s…)

    Ivan
    Todd W. Carter
    Jack Kendall
    mike
    Rafa
    Fenng
    Tiziano Fogliata
    MsL
    Dave Winer
    Chris Pirillo

  3. Well done. I thought my 220 feeds and 4000 items waiting to be read was a good backlog. I removed all news-y feeds, recognizing that the BBC, New York Times, CBC, and others were filling up my list with too much content. In Bloglines, a feed that you haven’t read fills up and maxes out with a (200) beside the feed name. For me, that’s a good sign of something that a) moves too quickly and creates too much content to keep on top of or b) doesn’t particularly interest me anymore (possibly due to a)…) and is in need of pruning. I’ve got about 10 or so in this category right now (2000 of the 4000 items not read).

    In general, I think 150 to 200 feeds is about as much as I care to try to digest right now and fits in well with some kind of electronic Dunbar’s Number… Not that I maintain real relationships with all of the authors of the blogs I read, but there’s something going on there re: keeping track of people and their ideas.

  4. I’d be like to get your feedback on feedmashr.com which takes another approach to the rss feed mix. It mashes the daily popular rss feeds from the popular social bookmarking sites, and others, but also lets you go back in time to see links/posts you may have missed.

Comments are closed.