Tame Your Content Overload
March 1st, 2007
Everywhere you turn online, someone is preaching the virtues of content, but far fewer are providing solutions for keeping up with all of it.
Darren Rowse listed too many posts (the post levels are overwhelming) as the number 1 reason why people unsubscribe from feeds. I can attest to this because I’ve unsubscribed from many feeds, not because I didn’t enjoy them, but because I didn’t have the time to keep up.
Thankfully, there are ways to scale back on the RSS updates, but still get the information from your favorite sites.
Weekly Updates or Newsletter
Check to see if the site offers a weekly e-mail update or newsletter. Some sites may even offer daily blog updates — once a day, you’ll receive an e-mail compilation of all the posts published that day.
One bonus, which you may not realize, is that some bloggers offer extra information or other exclusives for e-mail newsletter subscribers.
Subscribe to Category Specific Feeds
WordPress blogs offer category specific feeds and many larger blogs will also offer category specific feeds. Instead of subscribing to the entire site update, choose which sections you’d prefer to receive updates about, only when an entry is posted in that category will the feed update.
If the blog author is using WordPress, but doesn’t have the category feed buttons visible, you need only add &cat=# (replace # with the category number) to the end of the feed URL or /feed/ to the end of the category URL if the blog has pretty permalinks enabled.
Use Your Feed Reader Like A Pro
Whichever feed reader or service you decide to use, make sure that you understand how to use all of the features to its fullest potential. Learning how to organize, search, and list your feeds within your reader can make your feed reading that much more productive.
Consider upgrading to a power feed reader if you need to manage large amounts of news and information. Personally, I’ve been using Newzie without too much complaint. It displays which feeds were most recently updated in a color coded list, allows you to search through feeds, quickly delete and add feeds, along with a number of other tasks.
[tags]feed management, information overload, increase productivity, blog reading, feed reading, newzie[/tags]