Stop the fire hose: Primary sources
You have a desire to read a lot of RSS feeds. You also have a desire to have your brain not explode. Balancing these two ideals can be tricky. Thankfully, there is one rule to manage your subscriptions that helps immensely: use primary sources.
Primary sources are feeds of people who write about things they’re learning. They are not link aggregators, and they are not multi-author news sites. Primary sources don’t need to post 20 times a day to generate ad revenue, and they don’t repeat themselves endlessly. Take a hard look at your Google Reader’s “Frequently updated” Trends list, and know thy enemy1.
Breaking up with multi-author blogs can be hard: it took me a long time to give up on Boing Boing. When I did, though, my RSS signal to noise ratio got much better. If you can’t stand abandoning a high-volume blog, take a look at what posts you care about. Chances are, there’s an author feed or section feed that will help your sanity.
Ditching aggregators can be even harder. Reddit and Hacker News send you to lots of interesting sites. As you subscribe to the best of those sites, however, the quality of the aggregator links goes down compared to the primary sources. Meanwhile, the aggregators only offer fire hose style RSS feeds rather than a “best 5 per day” option. Filter them or ditch them.
Of course, there are other ways. You could stash annoying feeds in folders based on how worth reading they are. You could switch aggregator sites every year, trying to keep ahead of the noise and inanity. You could just dismiss managing your incoming information as impossible or too time consuming. All these are symptoms of obsessing about missing something. Always consider what you’re seeing but not having the bandwidth to absorb.
- It’s worth noting that your enemy is not the quantity of feeds you’re subscribed to. RSS is great at handling very infrequently updating announcement-style feeds, and sometimes these are the best sources of timely information. [↩]
November 2, 2009
9:13 am
If you place all your aggregators in Google Reader as RSS feeds you can get some interesting performance gains.
For instance, having the Programming, Computing Science, Lisp and Haskell Reddits as RSS feeds allows me to bypass the idiotic masses upvoting uninteresting articles and filter them myself as they come in.
And after a short while of reading only articles I like Google Reader starts suggesting some very interesting “Primary Sources”. I now have a dozen or so decent blogs along side of the flood from Reddit.
Which leads to two different reading styles – for the Reddit feeds I scan very quickly. I often don’t even bother to read the entire titles. But for the other feeds I’ll often read at least the first paragraph.
That said, I still have a backlog of around 500 articles to get through in the primary sources, mainly because these last few weeks have been utterly insane with business. Moving, major releases, big bugs, family events, et al.
Also, Allen, you don’t really qualify as a Primary Source given your definition. You tend to comment on concepts you’ve gleaned from multiple Primary Sources. Are you trying to tell us to Fuck Off? ;)
November 2, 2009
9:15 am
Total aside,
Have you thought about using Disqus for comments? I find it useful for tracking my comments on blogs that use it, without having to remember them all manually.
November 2, 2009
9:32 am
I’ve just received a slight pagerank boost for my site, in regards to the search term “brain not explode”. Awesome.
Still, though, it’s good advice.
November 2, 2009
9:32 am
Ahh, fuck you, Dan.
November 2, 2009
10:16 am
Dan: Google Reader’s suggestions can be great, although I’ve never seen anything to indicate they go off of what articles you click on, but rather what feeds you’re subscribed to. Any background on that?
I’ve considered using Disqus, but I’ve never seen a disqus embed that didn’t look like ass. It’s presumably semantic CSS, so maybe that’s just the fault of the users, but every time I see it it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Curtis: As the a top 10 ranking site for “brain not explode”, I’m sure my pagerank for this term will bring you thousands more brain-oriented hits.
November 2, 2009
10:22 am
Re: Disqus CSS
Yeah, mostly the user’s fault. It’s fairly friendly to altering to your personal theme via CSS.
November 2, 2009
10:44 am
About my status as a primary source:
I am indeed guilty of this sometimes. My goal generally is to only post things I learnt myself, or links with insight that I consider original. Flipping through recent posts, I think I’m up to 2/3 “new insight” and 1/3 “link repost”. That said, I consider the links about Dave Shea, iWork.com, and VanJS to be original since I found or helped create them, so that’s a grey area.
November 2, 2009
4:58 pm
Definitely primary source if you’re a founder.
Pingback Antipode - Article – Feeds worth reading
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