Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Information Explosion OR RSS Hell

Last week I was blogging about the importance of producing information. I urge everyone I know to blog about their thoughts, findings, ideas or just nonsense. But like every other coin, this too has two sides.

This morning I got sick and tired from the RSS reader I used at work - Outlook 2007. Quite frankly, this is the worst RSS reader I've ever used. The straw that broke the camel's back was when Outlook stopped syncing feeds, and lost my stuff. So I moved to another RSS reader, and used my exported OPML file in order to keep my entire reading list. After the import completed successfully I realized I have too much stuff to read; my reading list is composed from way over 50 blogs, most of which are important to read. So sorting them and reading them consumes a considerable amount of time (before I even start with mailing lists...).

When I come home, I have a different reading list, which in turn is composed from about 50 blogs or so. It has been quite a while since I last added a blog to that list, as I don't think I can spare the time to read more. I prefer to stay productive and do other stuff.

As a result, I read blogs like I used to read newspapers when I read them: browse swiftly through the headlines, and read deeply only stuff that other people recommend (like when people share posts in Google Reader). There's a small (2-5) list of blogs which I read no matter what.

If anyone has a better idea to keep consuming huge amounts of information and stay productive, I'll be happy to hear.

1 comment:

  1. Google Reader is your friend... I wrote a couple of posts about using it to keep track of the internet and how to manage the feeds I'm reading.

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