Dealing With the RSS Feed Avalanche

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Matt from 37signals has an interesting post on this very topic. But his post was not that useful by itself. It was the comments section that had a wealth of important suggestions. Here are just a few I found to be useful:

1. “I use Bloglines, and it got kind of chaotic until I switched the view so that I only saw the headlines. Now I scan the headlines, and if something sounds interesting, I can click through.”

2. “Using the amazingly amazing Google Reader, I’ve set up a tag called “_mustread” which I apply to my most important feeds. The leading underscore makes it stay at the top of the tags list. I’ve even set Google Reader to start in that tag when I open it, so all I immediately see is new stuff from the feeds that are most important to me.”

3. “To succeed at filtering the many feeds that RSS addicts have come to subscribe to – the user needs to actively participate in revisiting the feeds and see who continues to produce quality content, and if they are posting often. If I see infrequent postings from a blogger, I’ll unsubscribe. If I feel the quality of the content is falling, I’ll unsubscribe.”

4. “Group your feeds by behaviour…it’s easier to pick off the low hanging fruits and slowly chip away at the backlog rather than sticking rigidly to subject taxonomies that are usually inadequate and give you no sense of how far through the job you are.”

5. “For enterprise users and Outlook users there’s Attensa for Outlook. It has an automatic prioritization scheme that works in the background as you read your feeds. It observes your behavior as you read through your feeds and continously prioritizes your feeds to bring the feeds that are most important to you to the top of a river of news…automatically.”

6. “I’m using Netvibes to collect and show my feeds in one glance. The nice thing about Netvibes as that you can control the number of posts that are shown. So if you want to see just the last 5 instead of 20, you can do that.”

Here are a few more blog posts on how to deal with feed overload:
Dealing with feed overload
Information Overload

I hope this information will help you organize your feeds and maybe even let you work for an hour or two after you are done reading all of the SEM blogs on your list. If you have any other ways to organize your feeds, please let us know.

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