Library clips

The quality (filtering) of information needs to be managed which in turn will help quantity and time…but how to do this?

Will we always have information anxiety?…in relation to current awareness (too much coming too quickly to process, organise and comment on).

A lot of talk about RSS overload has begun to re-emerge of  late (and later..again). I remember the excitement of finding how an RSS reader relieved my inbox of clutter and the whole subscribing/unsubscribing process. With the incredible popularity of RSS feeds (not just blogs anymore), now my news reader is full of clutter (though in a more organised way) and my email inbox is experiencing loneliness…now I need a solution for my rss reader, everyday I’m subscribing to new feeds (not just blogs and social bookmarks) and making search feeds…besides the overload I’m also experiencing a lots of duplication. RSS readers organise information coming in much better than email, and the subscription and reading process is much more convenient and efficient, but the problem still lies in time to read everything. I’ve made a lot of watchlist’s via Technorati of late and have found this does a great job, but it could never replace reading actual blogs - not that it trys to, ( I don’t want to miss anything) although when I research a topic a watchlist helps me identify new blogs of interest..they are a good starter…it also depends on your information needs.

Instead of cutting back or refining the load some solutions of late are converting your readers content into audio (so you can read on the go)…here is a good summary of the tools out there…this is the cutest.

This is a bit technical for me (although it would be cool listening to mp3 versions of your feeds in the car), I’m more interested, at the moment, in sampling a few other readers on the market that alleviate or streamline the reading process,  and recommend relevant information…at the moment I’m still totally hooked on Bloglines (good features like, clip blog, converting email to RSS, search query RSS feed, etc..)

…my thoughts on Bloglines

Readers to the rescue

Feedmarker

Handy tool that combines an RSS reader with a social bookmark manager. This difference with this tool is that you can manage your list of feeds by tag instead of a folder. The advantage of this is that a feed can be essentially tagged or put into multiple folders…and each of these tags have a feed of their own (it also has the "marked read" functionality and mark item to go into your bookmarks manager (this of course has a feed for every tag) so if you mark a post as read in your reader but want really want to read it later you can just put it in the bookmark manager and give it a tag like "to read".

So when you open up your RSS reader you can choose a tag, and read the feeds categorised within that tag…a good extension of this would be to join tags, so you can say I want to read all feeds with the tags: blog, rss, library, search, wiki, etc..Another great thing about this is that the public can subscribe to not just your OPML (your RSS reader account - all your feeds) but just portions of your account. I guess putting a tag on a bunch of feeds which generates it’s own feed is a bit of what Blogdigger does in making compilation feeds…but you can’t read a stream of posts you still have to open each feed to read the posts.

Awasu

Channel filters, channels hooks, search agents (similar to Bloglines search query feeds of your own subscriptions)

Findory

Recommends posts according to your reading history. (the content is delivered by the system not according to a list of your feeds)

Chameleon (plug-in for Bloglines)

Exerpt from the home page:

"Keeps track of which feeds you read, how often, and when
Figures out which feeds are your favorites, using a few novel algorithms, and highlights them
Identifies the top links in your feeds — like Blogdex, but for your feeds only
Shows you your usage scores based on the algorithms"

Urchin (web-based)

Exerpt from the home page:

"Urchin is a Web based, customisable, RSS aggregator and filter. It’s primary purpose is to allow the generation of new RSS feeds by running queries against the collection of items in the Urchin database."

Ego clip

Exerpt from the home page:

"Takes all the items from all your subscriptions.
Prioritizes them by how important it thinks each item is to you.
Saving you from wasting time digging through the many items that you don’t care about.
You don’t have to grade items manually. egoClip just notices when you show interest in an item and learns from that."

You: subscribe

Incorporates into Outlook…

Ultra gleeper (plug-in)

A recommendation engine based on your subscription list and more…

Exerpt from the home page:

Lektora

Exerpt from the home page:

"Lektora understands that your time is valuable. A news item that was not read yesterday is not likely to interest you today. Each time you refresh your feeds, Lektora presents you with only the latest news items, conveniently saving older news items in a daily archive that can be consulted at a later time."

Conclusion

In the end I feel machines can only do so much in organising, filtering, de-duping, and recommending information…you can’t know everything (unless you don’t sleep). We come to a stage when we have to be selective with our information…what’s the ROI, ie. how much of what I track will I blog or clip….if certain feeds are not contributing to ideas or content to your blog or clipping account, then we must let go of them. The next question is what about the feeds that only offer a good post once every couple of weeks (well hopefully another feed you read will also syndicate this information or you can try a search query feed within this web-site and subscribe to that instead).

Apart from more intelligent RSS readers…we need to select others who are already scouting areas of interest, we need to form an informal syndicate or (trust?) network, where people cover different areas - there are just too many blogs and search query feeds to cover everything for one person. eg. why would I subscribe to numerous feeds about Skype, when I can just read Unbound Spiral (of course it depends on the intent of your information needs, if your researching for a dissertation, the more the better, if it’s just current awareness then reading a blog that does all the ground work and presents the findings is enough).

In relation to filtering information for quality, it would be ideal if all blogs had category feeds, and further more, as described here, if every category RSS feed had a check box, in this way you can subscribe to your own mix of categories…also throw in a search query feed (sometimes called a smart list)to the mix or even more, refining a search query feed within a category. A way around this is if you duplicate your blog posts in del.icio.us or Furl(in the case of Furl, you would need a tool like Blogdigger to do the mixing), then people can subscribe to a mix of categories, and so forth (but this is a 3rd party solution).

NOTE: Does anybody know of an RSS reader that can mix feeds, a la Blogdigger?…and even generate search query feeds (within a group or just one feed), and also shut off certain feeds in your list of feeds?

I think if blogs (or more probable RSS readers) eventually are of this functionality it will help with the current problem of filtering for quality, inturn helping quantity and time…I guess it is an innate quality to perpetually push the envelope of "information managment" - at least for librarians and the like.

Here is a comment (by ade) on this post that adds some realism to this issue.