There’s been lots of talk in recent weeks and months of information overload, continuous partial attention and the like, and I’m absolutely feeling it. I complained about my absurd feed volume not too long ago. How bad is the problem?
Well, just last week I accidentally clicked “Mark All Read” in FeedLounge (even clicking through a confirming dialogue box), starting fresh. At the time, I was carrying approximately 15,500 unread items. Unfortunately, my respite was brief. After several days of heavy feed reading, I find myself in the hole by a count of 1634 unread items.
I don’t feel any real pressure to read all of it, fortunately, but it is an indication of how difficult it is to keep up these days.
Josh Hallett says:
March 21, 2006 at 7:51 pm
Of course there is something cathartic about hitting ‘mark all as read’ and just moving on 🙂
Danno says:
March 21, 2006 at 10:05 pm
Some people criticize it, but I think Google Reader forcing you read every item makes you be selective about the feeds you feel are worth keeping around.
I got rid of a couple that I’d usually not bother to read when I was with Bloglines.
Maybe it’s different when reading feeds is part of your job.
People Over Process says:
April 13, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Management by Feed/Feed Management, Part 1: Feed Filtering
Knowing my passion for RSS, James sent over this post from Marshall Kirkpatrick yesterday. Here, Marshall talks about “management by feed”, which I take to mean “using RSS to get the right information to the right people.” And if that’s…