DerekMartin.ca web development, spirituality, UFOs & the occult

RSS Addiction and Recovery

kid drooling over information

A while ago I was more than a little addicated to checking my news feeds... regularly. I had 191 indispensable feeds.

Were they all really that good? No, definitely not... but how to decide which ones to keep, and which to toss? I didn't want to miss out on any good information, so I formulated a plan.

For 60 days, I only read the web through my feed reader (NetNewsWire on the Mac and Reeder on the iPhone, both of which sync with my Google Reader's list of feeds).

Why did I use a feed reader?

1. It lets me star or flag articles I find particularly insightful or relevant
2. It automatically copies those articles to a special folder, so I can see JUST the articles I've found insightful & relevant

At the end of 2 months, I discovered that I had flagged 352 articles as insightful or relevent (6 per day). Armed with this data, I could begin to bring an end to the insanity.

I went into the Flagged items folder, and sorted by feed name. That let me count how many "insightful or relevant" articles I had found in each feed (I will post my actual numbers below).

Thinking about this data let me make some smart decisions:

1. I don't need to follow 7 different Apple blogs. I found that I had flagged more articles on 9to5Mac.com than on any other Apple-related group blog. I can now safely unfollow the rest and not worry about missing anything important. The same goes for gadget sites, where Engadget beat Gizmodo..
2. I should NOT put aggregator sites or group blogs in my feed reader! The unread count is ever increasing, and there is no way a mere mortal can keep up. The increasingly high "unread" count causes stress. I'm talking about: reddit.com, hacker news, gizmodo, wired news, boingboing, the new york times, and other mass-content-producing sites/networks.
3. I do not have to abandon aggregator sites & group blogs, I just need to NOT track how much of their content I have not read. The easiest way to do this is to put them all in a bookmark folder and simply right-click and "open all" when I want to browse random (previously deemed worthy) information.
4. I should make a policy of only subscribing to sites run by a single person. They usually have a much higher ratio of awesome posts to crappy posts. That person is either a good writer, or they're not. With group blogs & aggregators this is definitely not the case. Also, because individuals publish less, it's less to keep up with.

The next logical (but tedious) step would be to see how many articles were published by each feed during those 2 months, so that I could then figure out the signal to noise ratio and then trim down my feeds based on that data.

For example, if Hacker News (an aggregator) published 2000 articles in the last 60 days, and I found 20 of them insightful or relevant, the signal to noise ratio would be very low at 1%. By comparison, ASmartBear (blog run by 1 person) might only have published 10 articles, of which I found 3 insightful or relevant. The signal to noise ratio there would be 30%. Definitely high value.

I put *** beside aggregators & group blogs. Their numbers are lower than they would be, because at some point I became overwhelmed by them, and stopped reading & flagging their articles. I will be unsubscribing from them later today, and putting them in a bookmark folder, as I mentioned. I would have linked them all for you, but there were just too many!

• 38 - *** news.ycombinator.com
• 22 - *** search engine land
• 16 - *** AllFacebook
• 15 - *** phpdeveloper.org
• 10 - *** planet php
• 10 - *** reddit.com
• 8 - daringfireball.net (john gruber)
• 9 - entrepreneurs-journey.com (Yaro Starak)
• 8 - dumb little man - tips for life (jay white)
• 8 - seth's blog (seth godin)
• 7 - *** 9to5mac
• 7 - *** Ajaxian
• 7 - *** engadget
• 7 - *** wired news
• 6 - *** the unofficial apple weblog
• 6 - zen zhabits (leo babuta)
• 6 - *** readwriteweb
• 6 - *** real UFO videos and news
• 6 - *** signal vs. noise
• 6 - *** gizmodo
• 5 - dilbert.com blog (Scott Adams)
• 5 - *** arsTechnica
• 5 - chrisbrogan.com (social media marketing)
• 5 - *** boingboing.net
• 5 - mixergy (Andrew Warner on entrepreneurs & ism)
• 5 - *** macNN
• 5 - freelanceswitch (may give it at *** in future)
• 5 - small business marketing blog (John Jantsch's duct tape marketing)
• 5 - *** smashing magazine
• 5 - the single founder (Mike Taber of Micropreneur Academy & Startups for the rest of us Podcast)
• 4 - 47hats (Bob Walsh of StartUpToDo.com)
• 4 - the personal excellence blog (Celestine Chua)
• 4 - bobulate (Liz Danzico on Intentional Organization)
• 4 - I, Cringely (Robert X Cringely on technology)
• 4 - *** inside facebook
• 4 - *** mashable
• 4 - mysterious universe (awesome podcast)
• 3 - the launch coach (Dave Navarro)
• 3 - unclutterer
• 3 - *** lifehack.org
• 3 - *** lifehacker.com
• 3 - *** onstartups
• 3 - *** appleinsider
• 3 - *** cultofmac
• 2 - tynan.net (Tynan on life outside the box)
• 2 - @TheKeyboard (Chris Hartjes on PHP & Python)
• 2 - boxofcrayons.net (Michael Bungay Stanier on Good Work)
• 2 - scriptingnews (dave winer)
• 2 - high scalability
• 2 - About.com's Paranormal Phenomena blog
• 2 - interesting monkey
• 2 - startup lessons learned (eric ries on lean startups)
• 2 - venture hacks (good advice for startups)
• 2 - wil wheaton
• 2 - rotten tomatoes: new DVD releases (I flag the ones i want to see! super-handy way to remember)
• 1 - software as she's developed
• 1 - software by rob (Rob Walling of Micropreneur Academy & Startups for the rest of us Podcast, author of Start Small Stay Small - A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup)
• 1 - steve blank (customer driven development)
• 1 - ted talks
• 1 - the art of non-conformity (Chris Guillebeau)
• 1 - the startup success podcast (Rob Walling & Mike Taber)
• 1 - todd sattersten (100 best business books of all time)
• 1 - workhappy.net (Carson McComas)
• 1 - xkcd.com
• 1 - *** NYT > Technology
• 1 - penny-arcade (Mike Krahulik & Jerry Holkins)
• 1 - chris shifflett (PHP)
• 1 - raphael stolt (PHP)
• 1 - asmartbear (Jason Cohen)
• 1 - About.com's UFOs/Aliens
• 1 - ash maurya (practise trumps theory - lean startup + customer dev + bootstrap)
• 1 - blog.stackoverflow.com (Jeff Atwood & Joel Spolsky)
• 1 - JoelOnSoftware (Joel Spolsky)
• 1 - bob martin's object mentor blog
• 1 - codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)
• 1 - dan pink (author of Drive, Free Agent Nation, & others)
• 1 - david hayden (?)
• 1 - howard rooijen's blog (work smarter not harder)
• 1 - Ilia Alshanetsky (PHP)