Prioritising Feeds
Most of the time I'm not spending on client work at the moment is dedicated to catching up. There is a huge volume of email, letters and RSS/atom feed items that I have been neglecting for the last couple of months. The emails and letters each need proper attention, and I want to at least scan the headlines of the feeds, to check I have not missed something interesting.
Google Reader is lacking an obvious feature that would really have helped me scan my feeds over the past few days: The ability to find items that have been included in many feeds, and are therefore important to look at.
I subscriber to feeds of many blogs and other websites in Google Reader, and also many feeds of individual items that others have recommended. Often the same post appears many times. Google Reader should allow me to find these posts, and rank them by the number of times they were included in the feeds I subscribe to. It should probably let me assign a weighting to each feed, so that it can calculate a ranking for posts based on the weighting of each feed the post was included in. It might even be able to do a good job of calculating the weighting, based on my patterns of reading, staring and sharing posts in each feed.
This is exciting because the same mechanism would be a good way to navigate all video and audio, as well as text items.
Tagged: Media
Posted at 18:50 UTC, 15th May 2007.
3 Comments
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good point
At the same time, what really baffles me about Google Reader is that, unlike other Google products, it has got no search function. Is searching among feeds such a complex matter?
As for feeds themselves, I believe all should be formatted like yours, so that I can see when there are comments, thus a discussion going on that I'd like to join.
The other way
I still do this the old-fashioned way - i.e. I poll all the sites I'm interested in on a fairly regular basis.
I suppose this is inefficient, in that I spend a bit of time loading a site only to find that it hasn't changed, or I might read the same thing more than once, but on the whole I haven't run into any scalability problems with this approach (yet)!
Tabbed browsing is great for this, because I just pull up a page full of bookmarks and Ctrl+Click on a bunch of links, then spend the next few minutes tabbing through and closing them once I'm done.
Maybe I'm missing out on something big…? :-)
Using a feed reader is definitely faster. You can just hit a key to jump straight to the next story.
There's also the benefit that it keeps your bookmark on each site - you can see where you were, and how much you have not read.
The big downside is that you lose the navigation and feel of the site, which is often a big part of the effort the site owner has put in.