Of all the Web 2.0-ish innovations to come down the pike in the last couple of years, RSS seems to be the most pervasive. New readers (both web- and client-based) are cropping up all over the map and just about every site on the Internet (including this one) has some sort of syndicated content that you can read elsewhere at your convenience. It’s a revolutionary idea, to be sure.
But as an ancient Chinese philosopher once said, “You really can subscribe to too many RSS feeds, grasshopper”. I know that for me, every couple of months I’ll go on a subscribing rampage. Every site I read will get tossed haphazardly into my feed reader (whether I really found the content interesting or not), only to get sifted out later during the inevitable reader clean-up that follows such a spree. I can’t imagine I’m the only person that has this problem, and I think I’ve got a pretty slick solution…
Next time you’re clicking frothily from page to page, subscribing like it’s going out of style, give this a try: Use a Firefox Live Bookmark and toss that bad boy up in your bookmarks toolbar. Now, watch the feed for a few days and – more importantly – watch how many times you check that feed in the next few days. If you never give it a second look within a week of subscribing, kiss that thing goodbye and delete the bookmark. If you check it every day (or even several times a day) and find yourself checking back for new posts, you can probably be safe in the assumption that it’s a feed you’ll want to keep reading on a more permanent basis.
The idea here is to keep your main feed reader clean and well-organized. If you’re adding new sites willy-nilly, this will be a very difficult state to maintain. You’ll constantly be re-evaluating which feeds you really want and which are just there for some subconscious reason (like those of you who have a Slashdot feed subscription purely because it makes you feel geeky, even though you haven’t read it in months). Your reader should only contain sites you really, truly want to read. If you sit down to look at your feeds and find yourself skipping over the majority of your subscriptions, take all the feeds you’re skipping and Live Bookmark ‘em – see how long they last.
RSS is one of those things that can either increase or decrease your productivity by leaps and bounds. Keeping a tight leash on what shows up in your reader can make the difference between the two.
Technorati Tags: rss, firefox, web2.0, technology, productivity
Written by Brett Kelly
Productivity, Technology