« More on Polarization | Main | But Words Can Never Hurt Me »
January 26, 2007
The Downside of RSS Readers
I think Tyler's description of the danger RSS feeds pose is largely correct:
I also fear that ongoing use of RSS would lead to reading inflation; I would add new blogs to my feed because it is easy to do so, but encounter the intransitivity of indifference. I would end up overloaded.
I have around 140 blogs on my RSS feed. I closely, continuously read 20 or 30 of them. I check a handful more, and infrequently a couple dozen beyond. I never clean the thing out because, really, what's the marginal cost of retaining a blog that could be interesting, or that I feel I should be reading? That said, I'm fairly sure the list, in reality, overwhelms me, and compels more skimming and indifferent reading than I'm actually comfortable with.
January 26, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
I don't use an RSS feed, but my blogroll provides a similar example. I have 35 blogs on my blogroll. Of these, I rarely have more than 6 or 7 as daily reads at a given time, and I think that there are only 4 I've been reading daily continuously since I found them (Majikthise, Appletree, Feministing, and Just Dreadful).
Posted by: Alon Levy | Jan 26, 2007 1:58:11 PM
I find myself skimming a huge percentage of the things in my RSS reader. I have 15 blogs in my "first reads" category, another three in my "policy only" category that I read thoroughly, 1 in "regional" that gets attention, and 48 others.
The shelf life of most blog material is so short that one probably might as well just mark as read everything that you've never gotten around to. If it was important enough, it probably got a link on someone else's blog.
This may lead to further stratification, which is why I think it's important that the folks at the top do a tad more to promote folks a little further down the food chain.
Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | Jan 26, 2007 2:06:11 PM
Well, it all depends on who you consider a daily read. Some of the blogs I'd read if I had to crank the generator myself are fairly big, like Feministing. Others, like Just Dreadful and Debitage, are tiny and woefully underrated.
Actually, shelf life isn't that short when you write about policy. I find myself referencing some of my own posts over and over, like the one about welfare. Things like explaining why Bush's health care proposal is idiotic are more topical than de novo welfare plans, but other policy matters, like Ezra's series about The Health of Nations, are long-term.
Posted by: Alon Levy | Jan 26, 2007 2:17:19 PM
I've been dealing with the issue by setting a hard cap on the number of feeds I put into my reader. Once I hit the cap, if I want to add a new feed, I have to take out an old one.
That tends to prune out the blogs I am not really reading fairly effectively, and also keeps me from getting too overwhelmed by sheer volume.
Posted by: fiat lux | Jan 26, 2007 2:23:59 PM
As I type this, coming from the full text of Ezra's RSS feed, I have 358 feeds and 587 unread items in NetNewsWire, although many many of those are for work.
Yes, I skim a lot of the RSS items, but that's why they're there. I *would not* visit 358 web sites every day, or even every week, to see if anything was new or interesting. When I'm bored and faced only with a Web browser, I reliably hit CNN, Atrios, Kos, and TPM, and if I remember, Pandagon or BuzzFlash. (Presuming it's a weekend or something when the work-related sites wouldn't have anything interesting.) Instead, I have a group that reads 39 progressive blogs (including this one) every 8 hours, or 12 hours if I get really busy.
If you argue that I shouldn't skim those items but should instead visit the Web sites, I counter that you are Tom Friedman -- telling me that something would work if I do something I'm clearly *not going to do* is just fantasy. I'm not going to visit 39 progressive sites every day; if I have to visit them every day, I'm going to visit maybe 3, and they'll be the big big fish in the pond. I can add an RSS feed for a smaller blog and skim the items for a while and see if I like them. I recently picked up Jon Swift and InstaPutz that way. I still have Roger Ailes in the list when his infrequent updates (something I completely understand) would have dropped him from regular consideration long ago.
Every week or two, if I see a blog with several new entries that I've had absolutely no interest in reading, I remove it from the list. For example, I don't read the BuzzFlash RSS feed - I'm not interested in the constant promos and I see a lot of the articles in other places. BuzzFlash is like a hand-assembled news aggregator; I'll use it when I have only a browser, but when I can aggregate stories from sites on my own, that's my preference.
RSS is how I read news. Sites like this one, with a malformed Atom 0.3 feed, sometimes require me to view the page just to see the actual text instead of a screen full of XML tags - sometimes I'll do it and sometimes I won't. When I see new stories at TPM, I just open the page because Josh has frustratingly limited his RSS items to the first 50 words or so. Political Animal does the same thing, which is why I skip most of their entries - I don't have *time* to wait for them to get to the point. I gave up early on the TPMCafe feed because it was both abbreviated *and* badly formatted. They seem to have fixed this, but there are now something like 10 RSS feeds for TPM Cafe, and I don't have time to figure all that out, especially when Josh links to the best stuff at TPM anyway.
I also note that Daily Kos has *never* been afraid to put the entire text of every entry in the RSS feed from the very beginning. Blogs like Digby and TBogg seem to have Blogger problems; somedays they have the entire items and then a few hours later the feeds get republished only with summaries. Their writing is sharp enough that I'll put up with it. TalkLeft wisely (IMHO) chose to put entire text in RSS items. This place does the same thing, and it's a big reason I continue to read. (I don't object to ads in full-text feeds. Ads in abbreviated feeds are a big sign that the site owner really doesn't care about making anything easy for me, just about displaying ads, and those feeds and sites never last long with me.)
I just can't really understand the idea that people are "overwhelmed" by too many RSS feeds - the entire purpose of a good RSS reader like NetNewsWire is to let you skim dozens or *hundreds* more Web sites than you could by loading pages. It's like TiVo guilt - you record all these programs you "should" watch and then feel guilty about not watching them. Rubbish - read what you want and ignore what you don't have time to read. If there was a good point buried in a 6-page post, the blogger needs to learn to write better so you can find it. Delete the recordings you don't want to watch after all, skim the entries that don't interest you as much, and get on with your day.
Posted by: Matt | Jan 26, 2007 3:04:34 PM
I abandoned organizing my feeds into folders by topic (which seems most intuitive) and moved to organizing them by tiers of interest level. I have about 30 in a 'Daily' folder which I check multiple times a day and read closely. I have another 50 or so in 'Frequently' which I check probably once a day. Then another group in 'Infrequently' which I check every few days and skim. And a bunch more in 'Rarely' which I check once a week or so and skim quickly. This turns out to be a much more efficient way of sorting through them and I've shaved about half the time I spend going through my reader. Also, it's easy to reflect my waxing or waning interest in a feed by promoting it up or down the tiers.
Posted by: sidereal | Jan 26, 2007 3:07:45 PM
I have around 140 blogs on my RSS feed.
And yet sadly, none of them is mine.
I don't use Bloglines for the blogs I know I'll visit every day. I use it primarily to broaden my reading without making it unduly burdensome; if I click through somebody's comment and see a blog that looks like it might have something interesting, I add it to my feeds. That allows me to skim a great deal of material, which doesn't preclude reading a smaller set of blogs in greater depth.
I also have a playlist just for wingnuts, for when I want to do a quick survey of wingnut opinion on something or other. It's immensely useful for projects like that.
And like Matt, above, I use Bloglines for blogs that are erratic in updating. As he says, it's better than abandoning them altogether.
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Jan 26, 2007 5:51:27 PM
100 is my upper limit. And I read everything and try to skim the comments to each post. There are probably 25 I inhabit, read the post & comments closely enough to see if there is something I want to say that hasn't been said already.
And yeah, it's overwhelming. The bloglines updates several times a hour, and when I am reading in the pane and see "25 items added..."
I really have to cut back. There are books to be read. But you people are just all so good...
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Jan 26, 2007 8:27:59 PM
"I never clean the thing out because, really, what's the marginal cost of retaining a blog that could be interesting, or that I feel I should be reading?"
Wrong thinking.
RSS is only for sites you visit regularly. (Or for sites that update infrequently.)
If you aren't visiting regularly, delete the RSS feed and use a bookmark in your browser instead.
Posted by: Petey | Jan 26, 2007 9:10:30 PM
"Wrong" thinking? Who made you The Decider? Use it the way that works best for you and tell everyone else to sit down and shut the hell up.
That's why I advocate providing full-text feeds - complete with links. Here's a recent "Political Animal" item, exactly and entirely as it shows up in RSS:
NO, YOU ARE NOT TRYING OUT FOR A FEDEX COMMERCIAL....This is one of my pet peeves too. At least, it used to be back when I had a job where I got lots of voice mail. Today, not so much....
Useless. You have to visit the page to discover that the word "This" is supposed to be a link to another site. Atrios puts his links in his feeds, and therefore his short items are not confusing, and he doesn't seem to be suffering in popularity.
Washington Monthly would rather only tease things and leave RSS readers confused. Make things hard for readers and - guess what? - you get fewer readers.
Posted by: Matt | Jan 26, 2007 11:09:02 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: best penis enlargement | Jun 2, 2007 7:32:17 AM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: free penis enlargement exercises | Jun 2, 2007 9:14:32 AM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: free penis enlargement exercises | Jun 2, 2007 9:20:30 AM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: free penis enlargement | Jun 2, 2007 10:57:01 AM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: free penis enlargement | Jun 2, 2007 11:01:37 AM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: penis enlargement pills | Jun 2, 2007 12:33:47 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: penis enlargement pills | Jun 2, 2007 12:39:42 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: penis enlargement pump | Jun 2, 2007 2:14:12 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: penis enlargement pump | Jun 2, 2007 2:18:23 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: penis enlargement | Jun 2, 2007 4:00:50 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: real penis enlargement | Jun 2, 2007 5:58:20 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: real penis enlargement | Jun 2, 2007 6:09:34 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: alternative viagra | Jun 2, 2007 8:24:34 PM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: natural alternative to viagra | Jun 3, 2007 4:42:50 AM
herbals@drugs.com
Posted by: natural alternative to viagra | Jun 3, 2007 4:50:29 AM
