Common Craft Blog
Why I Stopped Reading Blogs (for a while)
By leelefever on September 14, 2008 - 8:36pm
1000+ items. That's what Google Reader told me I need to read to catch up with my RSS subscriptions. It's intimidating. My RSS feeds were mocking me. I could see them with sneaky voices "hee hee, you'll never read me, you don't have the time. ha ha." The sad part is, they were right.
I stopped opening my RSS reader months ago. It wasn't a concerted effort, I just didn't do it. What I found was that longer I stayed away, the easier it was to stay away. Returns diminished with each passing day and at some point I gave up on reading anything via Google Reader. Now, I'm happy to report that I'm back on the wagon (I think that's the right analogy). My time away gave me some perspective on what I want to read and where I want to read it.
Culprit #1: Twitter
I was trying to figure out a clever title for this post along the lines of "Twitter Killed the RSS Star", but it wouldn't work. The sentiment works in my case however. I have integrated Twitter into my life and I think that it became a surrogate for reading blogs. Lots of people I follow share their blog posts on Twitter, I have found the relationships that are created to be more personal and it's all so lightweight. Watching Twitter updates gave me the feeling of connection, awareness and discussion that I love about blogs in an efficient and manageable package. Before I knew it, Twitter had replaced reading RSS feeds.
Culprit #2 Subscribing to the Wrong People
Looking back, my RSS reader has been filled with people I felt I should be reading. Let me repeat that - should be reading. I think that's a problem. I felt like I needed to watch TechCrunch to stay on top of tech news. I felt like I needed to subscribe to experts in my field(s). Sure, these subscriptions were educating me and raising my awareness, but I seriously question the cost/benefit. Reading them felt like homework - and I don't like homework.
This all came to a head recently when our best friends (and former Seattle neighbors) came to town and stayed with us. Within a little while, blogging came up and it turned out they had both posted a few entries in the run-up to the trip to Seattle. I had no idea. I had to tell them that I stopped reading blogs and I felt bad for not keeping up. These people matter about a million times more than the people clogging up my RSS Reader and I had let the 1000+items-of-things-that-don't-matter scare me away.
What I Did
Like I've done before, I started over. I opened up Google Reader, took a nice long look at the list and asked myself - does this matter to me? Do I even know this person? Will I be worse off without this content in my life? No. No. No. Nearly everything was wiped clean.
When I started adding feeds to fill the void, I did it with a filter. My RSS reader isn't for news, it isn't for niche analysis, it isn't because I "should". My RSS reader is now filled with subscriptions to sites that matter to me. These posts are written by people I know and care about. They make me feel like reading RSS is a treat - a few minutes spent being with an old friend.
It's only been a little while, but I think RSS may, once again, become a strong contender for my passive time. Now I can miss a day of RSS reading, open the reader and have Google Reader tell me I have 10 posts to read. That, I can do.
I feel your pain
Lee,
I've been where you were at many times.
I could probably stand to start over, like you; but, I've opted instead to just fight through and digest the information I subscribe to (now over 400 sites) as best I can.
I've got Reader set up with some labels for topics and such that I care about, and one label for stuff that I really don't care about (psst...Techcrunch is one of them!).
I make it a point to, in my passive time (early hours at work, late at night on the couch with my SO), go through my feeds and keep it down to 0 items.
And sure, there are times when I'll come in and see the dreaded "1000+" (I really wish they'd carry it out to 5 digits). When that happens, I take a deep breath, make sure I've looked at the few sites I truly care about, and click the "Mark all as read" button.
Chances are, some other site I really care about will pick up the most important and interesting stuff I may have missed.
So, now that you've started over, I'm curious: how many subscriptions are in your Reader at the moment? Care to share some of your most favorite ones?
I'm going through the same process...
Funny, I'm going through the same process. FriendFeed really changed how I find interesting stuff anyway. I still enjoy the serendipity, though, and the smart people coming through my reader.
Dulling our senses
I thought I was bad with 200 odd sources...I posted on this the other month, questioning whether being bombarded with all these feeds actually made me smarter or had the opposite effect.
http://www.thisisherd.com/2008/06/pumping-iron-or-is-internet-dulling-ou...
Also worth a look, a Dutch creative who rationed his intake to no live TV, one magazine and one news website a day and found his life really improved:
http://www.thisisherd.com/2008/05/zoning-out-media-noise-can-less-mean.h...
RSS
Thank God you wrote that. I'm gonna get my life back too.
Blessed RSS
One of the strange blessings of the Google Reader quirk that sees the "Mark all as read" button right next to the "Refresh" is that occasionally and inadvertently one hits the former when in the main folder, clicks yes and there they all are gone in an instant.
I do occasionally weed out truly boring and pointless feeds, but there are so many in my list that have provided a very, very useful and/or entertaining post that I'd rather not start from scratch. Anyway, I do use RSS for sourcing information for my day job and using the search facility in GR is powerful in that regard.
RSS
Been there, done that, lost that t-shirt -- like so many others. Then I got really organised (hey, that's a great start for an information manager, isn't it?)
There are journals I HAVE to read for work, lots of them, they're in one folder.
There are press releases from government agencies ditto in another folder, careers information ditto and so on.
Then there's my personal stuff and believe you me there is NOTHING in the "Hazel's personal stuff" folder that I don't want to have there. I may skim the posts sometimes but always at least look.
As for Techcrunch I gave up on that ages ago -- too much information I cannot cope with!
Common Craft? That stays, of course.
Recognizable
I recognize what you say Lee. The Mark All As Read button has always been my friend: if there is something important in the feeds today, it will also be there tomorrow, it will keep being talked about. So I never look at the number of unread items. It is not an important number for me.
I use my feedreader for three things:
1) outside in
I track 300 to 400 people (all of whom I know personally), and have a daily look at what they talk about. This is not reading items, but looking at what groups of people think is important today. "Hey all my former colleagues talk about the elections today", or "most of those researchers think the MIT press release is noteworthy". Because if something matters to people that matter to me, it may be important to form my own opinion. It results usually just in bookmarking and adding a comment to a site here and there. This is pattern hunting for what groups and communities I am part of think is important today. This I can skip easily if I don't have time. Anything that is sufficiently important will be talked about tomorrow as well. So I always hit 'Mark all as read' upon closing my feedreader. The 300-400 people I track are my 'large antenna array' to make sense of what is going on in the world. Those closer to me are as important as those further away from me (socially). The group further away from me is an important source of 'weak signals' for instance.
2) inside out
Based on my current questions I search the feeds of people that I track, for specific topics, and then read what I find. Inside-out is the only way I really read individual items. And write about it, or use it in another way.
3) to be prepared
When I go to a meeting, or to see somebody, I always look at their feeds beforehand. To establish their current context. (So in your example I would have looked at your friend's feeds before they arrived)
That said, I still see creep in my subscriptions. So gardening, and reorganizing every 18 months or so, is necessary.
I used to have all my feeds in 1 big folder (looking for emerging patterns is hard if I already have everything ordered in folders myself). Now I am moving more to a folder structure where social distance and group/community are the criteria. So that I can decide to only look at feeds from a certain group of people when my time is limited.
Been there also. One thing
Been there also.
One thing that helped me out to manage the almost 300 feeds was to pick the noisy ones (by checking the trends on Google reader) and trimming them with the help of AideRSS.com. I'm only getting the Best posts, which reduced the volume almost by 60%.
I also label some feeds (about 30) on Google Reader as "essential". That way, if i don't have time to read the other ones (trying to spend 1 hour per day) i just mark them all as read.
Frindfeed might have a chance there, if it picked their best of the day picks and pair it with your OPML feed list. Just an idea.
twitter vs RSS na na
I see few twitter users following 5000 users !!! If 10% of them update once in a day, he would be getting around 500 messages.. thats insane amount of information to process.
When we don't get original intent of any service, the outcome is clutter. I meant the information clutter here. It applies to any social media component like twitter, RSS, mybloglog etc..
thanks for the wonderful post leelefever .
regards,
Rajamanohar
http://www.hexolabs.com
Nice post. :) I feel a
Nice post. :) I feel a similar way, at times. The most enjoyable posts to me are the ones made by people that I am friends with, people that I care about.
I do need to follow various sources for some of the blogging that I do, though.
Patrick
Thank god - I thought I was
Thank god - I thought I was alone! :'o(
The "Mark all as read" button is amazing...but it still feels a little wrong every time.
Slowly, I'm weaning my RSS list down. I think we need a support group to help each other through this. *nods*
Scary!
WOW! I had just tweeted that I was seriously thinking about deleting all my feeds in FeedDemon because I too hadn't opened it in about 3 months. I thought about starting all over again. Then seconds later I open FriendFeed to find a colleague pointing to this article. Spooky or WHAT?!
I've culled from 500+ down to 10 and feeling soooo much better for it!
Your #2 point is very key: I
Your #2 point is very key: I feel like I should be watching the "firehose" type feeds, which provide the cutting edge news at the rate of 5 posts/hour. But, whenever I add those, I never read them. If I can't bring myself to unsubscribe right away, I put them into a folder with a sarcastic name: "Really?! are you kidding?!" which always has 1000+ posts. Then I can read the filtered blogs and important blogs in peace.
DITTO!
Thanks Lee for sharing your thoughts on that. You have reminded me that not ALL information is WORTH READING information. I am a very selective individual...and even I was getting lost in the RSS abyss of "should read". I just cleaned up my RSS feeds and I feel GREAT!
I have this great rule to keep my life free of clutter and it goes like this: what ever I buy, I MUST get rid of the equivalent. So if I buy a pair of jeans, I must get rid of a pair of jeans, a pair of shoes, must get rid of one (usually donated to a charity) the same goes with everything in my life...and NOW, the same will apply to my RSS feeds to keep my life and mind clutter free.
Thanks for the great reminder and for always giving great value just by keeping it real.
I No Longer Feel Alone in my RSS Guilt
Thanks so much for writing this. I, too, became a Twitter rather than RSS person, but I've slowed down on both currently. Sometimes managing the information firehose requires just saying - not right now! Maybe later, maybe.
The current evolution is for tools to support relationships.
I love reading posts like this. They really show the evolution of our relationships to and management of information online, as well as our management of relationships themselves online, both personally and professionally.
Feeling guilty about poor relationship management -- sure, that makes sense. But feeling guilty about poor information management? On paper it just seems so bizarre, and yet, very real. What *should* I know? Problem is, it's not possible to know it all anymore. We don't have sufficient bandwidth, and it seems folks just keep building a better fire hose.
I love seeing comments from folks like @Armando Alves above, noting how using our stuff has helped them streamline and improve the quality of their reading time. I love hearing stories about how intelligent filtering and ranking has improved personal and professional productivity. At the same time, I've surprised any number of people when I've freely admitted that for some folks, what we enable isn't for them. These are the folks for whom the human side of filtering is a good part of the value, not just the process.
These are the people who trust not only their own brains more than what the machines can do, but also who tend to focus on relationship-enabled filtering. Twitter is a great example. It's been terrible for affecting my blog posting volume, but great for affecting the quantity and quality of many of my connections. It's also been fantastic in delivering right to me great content I'd not have seen otherwise. And typically, said content comes from people whose opinions I trust when they say it's valuable stuff.
I think the evolution of managing information online lies in people-friendly tools, ones that take the power of relationship influence into account, and that are flexible to be used and mashed up according to individual needs. I think just as important, though, are the realizations like those Lee had, in determining what you want to know, rather than what you feel you should know.
Ultimately, I suspect that when you're caught up on things that actually matter to you, the guilt will start fading and you'll find that you've reached an equilibrium where -- voila -- what you wanted to keep abreast of turns out to be what you "should" have kept track of all along. :)
You did the right thing
Plenty of times we feel guilty for seeing that 1000 plus notice. I also noted that I had many blogs that I just never read. I then cut it all down by about 80% and used the headings of Daily, Important and Other to prioritize my reading.
I Hear Ya.
I cracked up when I read your post this morning. I took Friday off for vacation and sure enough returned to an overflowing inbox. The funny thing was I made sure to sift through and read your post. I say that because I've discovered that I tend to subscribe by email to those blogs I know I'll really dig and read consistently whereas I'll usually take a Friday afternoon to sort through a week's worth of RSS feeds in my Reader. I'm also realizing that it's not crucial to read the "big blogs" because everybody reads the big blogs. No point. Find your niche and pick out the blogs you really find enjoyable.
Ditto, Been There...Wrote the Same Blog Post
We have all been there and it's just a matter of closing down to just what you need to read. The other good thing about RSS....it's NOT email and you do not have to read it. I now skim and clear.
http://www.93south.net/index.php/2008/03/11/social-media-breakdownive-ju...
Same here! I switched from
Same here! I switched from RSS readers like iGoogle to a private aggregator (aggregator module from durpal core) on my own pages. It's more comfortable because it cleans out automatically :-)
Additionally I have the top article text immediately on-screen instead "on-click".
Maybe that's an option for you, too.
I'm Bill, and I have a problem
Actually I don't have the same problem with RSS (yet) but this is exactly the problem I started having with forums last year, one aviation forum in particular. I kept up with it daily, no hourly, for about 8 years. I'd feel guilty if I missed something. Then anxious when I'd log in after being away a few days and have 20 pages of posts to catch up on. Then I slowly started being away from it. The longer I was away the easier it was. Now I'm off completely. Sigh... RSS is sneaking up there and replacing the way I used to use that forum, although I'm using this for more useful stuff. I can't imagine keeping up with Twitter though - maybe I just don't get that technology yet.
I've got about 1000 feeds in
I've got about 1000 feeds in my reader but deal with it differently. Like I didn't read every newspaper, or every article in the paper I did read, i have no compulsion to do the same with RSS.
I might only read the 40 Formula 1 feeds in the reader the weekend a race is on but they are there, ready if I want/need them.
In each major category (Home, IT, Work) I have a Favourite folder. It might be the 10,20,30 articles that I will read, the rest are "might read. Mark All as Read will clear the slate, ready for tomorrow.
* I often get asked how I find content I share, email or blog, I respond "I don't find it, it finds me"
The Dirty Harry Approach
A while ago I took the Dirty Harry approach to my RSS feeds. Do they "make my day"? If they don't ... then they go.
Bayesian Filters
I've been using Bayesian filters to sort posts that I should find interesting. Think of it as a reverse-spam filter for RSS feeds. It works great, and the more I use it, the better it gets. I *highly* recommend doing so if you're trying to drink from a firehose of information.
what product do you use to
what product do you use to perform baysian filtering on RSS feeds?
The cycle of cleaning ones locker
Really interesting post, and I think a typical situation for most blog readers and hyperactive users of the web.
Pile a bunch of stuff into a drawer, and once it becomes overstuffed, we clean it out. Spring cleaning. We do it once we realize we've followed too many people on Twitter, particularly those who tend to be noise makers. And the same goes for blogs.
Love Gain Heaton's "Dirty Harry Approach".
All this said, the ability to organize and filter your feeds by topic is incredibly useful.
interesting perspective
The amount of noise some blogs churn out is intimidating at times (there is no doubt about that). In my view though, that rss reader probably helped drive the building of your twitter network.
Rss readers are really just like an email client and one needs to use common sense: if you subscribe to a load of RSS feeds (even of high quality), you will get lost in the noise.
Thanks for inspiring me
Thanks, Lee, for inspiring me to clean up my RSS subscriptions. I removed about 100 feeds that either I don't follow much or that I can easily track through Twitter, Friendfeed, and other social means.
I found it a lot easier to
I found it a lot easier to start subscribing to different feeds when I finally started to do it. Now I can’t stop! Subscribed to this one too
Good article
Wrote the Same Blog Post
We have all been there and it's just a matter of closing down to just what you need to read. The other good thing about RSS....it's NOT email and you do not have to read it. I now skim and clear.
yedek parça, ucuz parça, ormer, dörtler oto, ormer bilisim
It was all just making me DIZZY!
I stopped reading my Google feeds several months ago, it was all just making my head spin. I haven't even gone back to hit the button to make it all go away, I don't even want to see it! There are certain sites that I will always visit, I have them bookmarked, I prefer reading on the site to a reader anyway. I have Google alerts set up for many of the others, those I watch closely. It seems to be working for me, I am less stressed out, have given myself back hours in each day, have cut through the crap and am reading both what I want to and what I need to.