Dealing with Information Overload- Managing RSS Feeds

Life on the internet moves fast. Very Fast. In a couple years businesses can go from boom to bust and obscure technologies like AJAX can become the industry standard seemingly overnight. Keeping up with the wealth of new information has become a challenge for people, but syndicated feeds like ATOM and RSS can help reduce the clutter by only focusing on new or updated information and avoiding the rest. Even subscribing to 15-20 blogs can become a problem and the constant stream of unread items can become overwhelming.

The base problem is the large number of posts per day from first-movers. TechCrunch(~5/day), Engadget(~25/day), Lifehacker(~15/day), Mashable(~30/day). These Blogs and Websites are usually the first to break news in the blogosphere - which you don’t want to miss - but tend to post way too many items daily - which you can do without. Just Over the course of one week they would have published between 300-600 posts just between the 4 of them.

Keeping on top of all this information means checking your feed reader often. We like to think of this as multi-tasking but it’s more likely a case of Continuous Partial Attention Syndrome, which unlike multi-tasking, hampers productivity.

Filtering Feeds by Author

The Digital Inspiration blog highlights a simple Yahoo! Pipes based solution for filtering your feeds to only the authors you want to read. This is great for multi-author blogs like TechCrunch where the articles with real bite are usually written by Micheal Arrington or Duncan Riley.

Weblogs Inc based blogs like Engadget have an easier method to separate the posts by author, http://www.engadget.com/bloggers/ryan-block/rss.xml.

Filtering Feeds by Keywords

FeedRinse provides an easy way to allow or disallow items based on keywords, it’s easy to use and reminds me of the Gmail Filters. You can also filter items by authors, categories or tags.

This is useful for personal preferences, like never having to read a post that has anything to do with ‘iPhone’ or ‘700Mhz’ auction.

Filtering Feeds by Quality of Posts

This is my favorite way of dealing with information overload. AideRSS is a filtering service like FeedRinse but instead of keyword or tags it uses a proprietary system (PostRank) to determine the best posts on each blog. This allow you to subscribe to the Good Posts, Great Posts, Best Posts or the Top 20 from that Blog.

From ReadWriteWeb - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/first_look_aiderss_feed_filtering.php

PostRank = number of comments, number of bookmarks the visitors made, and the number of trackbacks, information from digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket and Bloglines.

PostRank ranks post from 1-10 (with 10 being the most important posts), and the idea is that the most talked about posts are likely the most important. The key to making PR work, however, is really the normalization. A PR10 post on Slashdot, for example, where 100 comments isn’t out of the ordinary, will be different than a PR10 post on a smaller blog where 15 comments might be abnormal.

Using AideRSS I’ve been able to cut down my items by less in half.
From ~1200 to a more manageable range of 350-600 items/day.

Those are my tips for taking back control of your time and attention,
do you guys have some more tips you’d like to share ?