A Social Life

Surviving Aggregation Overload May 31, 2006

Posted by Steve in : Uncategorized / add a comment

My friend Osh just posted 10 great ways to stay focused when everyone (and everything) wants your attention. I’ve never been very good at this. Case in point: his article popped up and I read it immediately

Anyway, Osh didn’t mention RSS overload, which is my primary problem right now. So I thought I’d tack one more item on to his otherwise comprehensive list:

#11. Categorize your RSS feeds by priority, not topic

Judging by some quick browsing on bloglines, a most people use an RSS aggregator’s folders to organize feeds into particular topics: “Computer Stuff”, “Politics”, “Music”, etc. That’s fine when you first start, but as soon as you’ve subscribed to 50+ feeds you’re going to start feeling RSS overload (aggregatoritis?)

The simple truth is that, within any particular topic, not all blogs are created equal. You probably already know which ones you read often and which ones you get to when you’ve got a chance. But your aggregator doesn’t care: it shows an angry bold number next to any feed you’ve dared to ignore for a while.

Bold numbers, along with system tray notifications and toaster pop-ups, are your enemy when you’re trying to focus on something more important! So do what I do: divide those topics into multiple folders. Then order the folders by priority: high, medium, low. Some aggregators let you specify any order for folders, but if you’re stuck with an alphabetical ordering you can always use numbers to control this process.

Now give up on staying current with medium and low priority feeds.

That’s right, once you’ve sorted things this way, you can guiltlessly ignore the bold numbers. Just start reading from the top folder, and read until you’ve reached a self-imposed limit. Don’t worry if some folders start filling up with unread items… on a slow work day, you’ll read a little further down the list and catch up.

Or maybe you won’t. Guess what: anything that’s important will be echoed on your high-priority blogs within a day of the news breaking anyway.

There’s a little more to it, though. You have to keep your prioritization flexible, and occasionally review your feeds to see if your real-world reading is matching your predicted priorities. If you start to notice that a single feed in a high priority folder is falling behind, make a snap decision: catch up if it’s truly important, or more likely, demote it to a lower priority. Likewise, if you find yourself anxiously awaiting fresh content from a low-priority feed, bump it up! Finally, make sure that you don’t have so many “high priority” feeds that you can’t finish them all…

You won’t actually have to rearrange feeds very often. In fact, you’ll probably arrive at the right priorities within a few revisions - I haven’t had to do any cleanup in months. The feeds with highest signal:noise ratio distinguish themselves quickly and float to the top.
My method isn’t that different than using a probation folder to weed out bad subscriptions. In essence, every feed is under probation, always ready to be moved up or down in priority… But I’d rather presume my feeds are “innocent until proven guilty,” or at least, guilt-inducing.

You need never be a slave to the little bold numbers again!

By the way, don’t forget to file my feed as high priority.

(On the a related note, maybe David Weinberger is right and the cure to information overload is more information… More on this if I can stay focused enough to finish my next articles!)