tecosystems

Don’t Find Feeds for Me – Help Me Cut Them

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Not that you can tell b/c I haven’t the ideal publication format for it yet now that I’m off Bloglines (might have a fix soonish, though), but I whacked my blogroll down by a significant margin over the last week or so. It’s still completely unmanageable, of course, sitting at 14,000+ unread items, but it’s better then it was.

This development is perhaps interesting in the context of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with someone who lamented the fact that feed readers/aggregators didn’t help them “find new feeds,” predicting that that would be a “killer feature” for a client. It may well be that that’s true, if the anemic numbers about RSS adoption in the general public are correct; certainly the Google Reader seems designed around a user who maintains a very few active feeds.

But for me, and – I’d bet – a lot of other high volume feed consumers, the killer feature wouldn’t be finding and adding new feeds, but pruning old ones. I’m constantly adding a feed here and a feed there, for a variety of reasons: they wrote something particularly compelling, so-and-so told me they were worth reading, they’re in a role that I should be tracking, or maybe they just linked to me and looked at least moderately interesting. The little things, as they have a tendency to do, alas, added up until I found myself with an unread count in the 40K range post holiday break.

Despite the fact that I’d recognized the problem quite a while ago, I did little to fix it until this past week (not that I in any way consider it “fixed”). Why? Because none of the readers I’ve used, including my current choice, provide me with anything in the way of abstracted metrics on my feeds. The task of cutting back my blogroll to some sort of manageable level is thus left to me, and when you have as many as I have (400+) it’s difficult to know where to begin. I’d love for FeedLounge, for example, to help me out by tagging feeds that haven’t been updated for a while with something like a ‘deadfeeds’ label. I’d also love to have some visibility into my browsing metrics: which feeds do I – whatever my intentions might be – simply not get around to reading? Which feeds, that aren’t already on my firstfeeds list – my high priority tag – should be there?

Much has been made of stats and metrics of late, what with some of the acquisitions (MeasureMap) and added features (Feedburner) – and maybe the feed readers can take a page from this. Because while I’m most certainly a feed reading edge case, I suspect there are a fair amount of folks out there that need more help cutting then they do adding.

P.S. One other interesting behavior possibly worth noting; I’ve begun implicitly delegating my feed tracking to a variety of folks I trust. Where it used to be when someone I trusted would mention a good feed, I’d simply add it to my reader without any further thought. These days, I never do that. Instead, I rely on them indirectly to keep me posted on their feeds of interest.

5 comments

  1. I don’t know why infrequent posting should be a bad thing. For my part, I am very happy to subscribe to a blog that has a great post every three months, and remains silent between. I think that’s what RSS was built for.

  2. I was only just thinking how “navigation” is a major blog issue, so yes, absolutely.

  3. Richard: i think everyone’s got a different threshold or appetite for dead feeds, but when i’m looking to pare down my tremendously overpopulated list feeds that are updated very infrequently are more likely to be cut. interestingly, however, i did cut some feeds that published *too* much. how’s that for contradictory 😉

    but in any event, folks i know – such as you – are exempt from such matters. folks that don’t publish much that i don’t know add value, they’re more likely to go.

    Jon: navigation is a *huge* deal, fully agreed on that score. whether or not my small pruning job is going to make navigation easier is certainly open to debate, but it’s a start.

  4. I’m in kind of the same position myself, and have written about it in the past. What I’d *love* is an aggregator that allows me to mark mark feed items as ‘uninteresting’, and the aggregator was later able to use that to filter out similar items statistically, just as modern statistical spam filters do.

    Ideally this would just be part of a larger filtering mechanism where ‘uninteresting’ would just be another tag applied to individual feed items. It could also filter on other topics like ‘botswana’ or ‘programming’.

    The items marked ‘uninteresting’ would still be there, but could be ignored as the aggregator would show a view of items displaying only those matching certain criteria such as ‘unread’ and not ‘uninteresting’.

    Expanding that further, and you could build some of the features Merlin said he’d like (http://www.43folders.com/2006/02/24/rss-features/) on top of that. If you kept marking items from a particular feed as ‘uninteresting’ or if the filter kept marking them as ‘uninteresting’, it’d eventually guess that you no longer wanted to be subscribed to that feed and ask you if this was so.

    I just wish I’d the time to write an aggregator like that!

  5. On Feed Culling: Ask Someone Else to do it

    Stephen recently said junkies like us need help culling, rather than finding, feeds. So why not make it a game? Nominate one of your regular readers or buddies and ask them to decide a feed or three for you to cut…

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