RSS anxiety
Feed reading lifecycle is a great post on the phases of rss overload.
Phase 1 is so exciting
Phase 2 is still exciting
Phase 3 is hard to let go
Phase 4 is arduous
Filtering content on blogs by making a search feed on a single blog, or subscribing to just a category, or even a search within a category feed, also an OPML search feed…see here.
Grouping feeds in folders according to importance rather than subject matter as now we are storing according to attention
Phase 5 you gotta do something!
Personalisation/Recommedation
Findory (also neighbours)
Searchfox
Chameleon
Ultragleeper
Personal Bee
nusEye
Blog experts
I can’t watch search feeds, or tag feeds, there’s just not enough time (you can filter for duplication, del.icio.us filtered, or even use Feed Digest to filter any feed.)
Instead I like to subscribe to blogs who already do this, I don’t have to subscribe to web2.0 tags or search terms in del.icio.us or Technorati or Digg or Google news as there are 4 or 5 blogs that already cover this area well enough…I guess Technorati Blog Finder may help you in finding these experts.
If some blogs are already scouting these places for your favourite topics, why do it yourself, just look for the blogs already covering this area, and maybe they can subscribe to you if you are an expert on something, we can’t monitor everything, so finding the blogs that do is what counts.
At the moment I’m down to 25 essentials (my blogroll), 30 or so goodies, then 100 or so more, the rest I just don’t get round to reading.
So I have approx 150 important feeds:
25 essentials I rarely miss daily (especially my top 10)
30 more goodies I try to read at least 2 or 3 times per week
the other 100 I try to read at least once a week hopefully
…and that’s it, no more.
Since I’ve done this I seem to feel a little less RSS anxiety 
Meme Engine
Attention Engine
More
I’m going to check out Sphere, and TailRank to see how they capture your personal interests, and distributed community…these are being seen as the new personal attention agents.
From the post:
“…Slashdot, Digg and Memeorandum are about spreading memes - these are Meme Engines. They don’t take into account your interests and who you value. Tailrank seems more like an Attention Engine to me - it promises to bring things to your attention that you want to know about based on your OPML (attention) file. Your data, interests, posts, blogs and people that match your attention profile. Powerful stuff.”
Also see this take on the RSS reader gap analysis.
We’ve always been talking about RSS overload, but I think the term attention is much more pro-active, and optimistic.
View comment reactions![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
This post really hit home for me. This was one of the main reasons that I started Blogniscient ( http://www.blogniscient.com ). In fact, I wrote a blog post about my information overload and Blogniscient’s beginnings at Blogniscient’s Blog last week ( http://blog.blogniscient.com/2005/11/12/a-brief-history-of-blogniscient-part-i/ ).
Ben Ruedlinger, PhD
President, Blogniscient, Inc.
Comment by Ben Ruedlinger — November 19, 2005 @ 12:25 am
I have made a site that filters my own postings from all my sites into categorized Newspages, and every Newspage has it’s own RSS Feed.
So for example - If a visitor is interested in “Gadgets”, he or she could subscribe to the Newspage named “Gadgets”. In that way the visitor gets all my postings about “Gadgets” from all my sites in one RSS Feed.
The problem is that the Newspages is filtered by keywords and that is not 100 % perfect. For example: If someone subscribe to the Newspage named “Audio” wants to read about audio encoding, mp3, ogg and such stuff - How to filter? Which keywords? If I use the keyword MP3 you also get postings about Gadgets who can play MP3 files. You understand the problem?
So the filtering is not 100 % perfect, but it’s far more easier for a visitor to read or subscribe to what’s interesting this way.
For every Newspage I can use as many keywords I like and specify how many posts the page will show.
You can visit the site here: http://svartling.hopto.org/directory/
Also there is an OPML file of all the sources for the site. But not for the filtered Newspages yet.
You can also see filtered Newspages here (with RSS Feeds): http://svartling.hopto.org/index.php?q=2005/sep/directory
The link is to a “Knowledge Book” I’m working on, that will be using filtered Newspages with postings from all my websites,
but more down to detail than on the above site. Newspages such as “AJAX”, “FFDSHOW” and “RSS”. With these Newspages you could subscribe to a specific subject instead of an whole site or category. The “Knowledge Book” starts with a Category at the top of the “tree of pages” and then divided into smaller specific Subjects/Tags, related to the top Category.
The whole “Knowledge Book” is made like an Outliner.
Please note that I’m still working on this “Knowledge Book”, so there is not so many Newspages there yet.
It will never be finished, because I will add Newspages to it all the time. Just like blogging, but in this case - every blogpost I made will have it’s own feed with related posts filtered by keywords…
Think about it: Quite amazing isn’t it?
For example: If I want to make a blogpost about a description of AJAX - Why not make a Newspage instead, and “tag it” with the keyword AJAX and get a feed with related posts from all my sites about AJAX at the same time?
I think “Newspages” is one way for a subscriber to minimize the problem with Information Overload, and for me as a Blogger - I’ve got a better way to publish my related posts from all my sites into one centralized page and feed automatically.
Stefan Svartling
Comment by Stefan Svartling — November 21, 2005 @ 5:15 pm