Information overload and the limits of RSS
I went on vacation for a week and during that time I didn’t get around to reading the 224 feeds that I normally read/scan daily. Five days into my vacation I fired up Bloglines and I had 1200+ posts sitting in my feed reader!!! (Actually I think it was more like 1600+ because I had already clicked on a whole set of feeds and inadvertently marked them as “read” before taking the screen capture of the 1232 posts.) Now, a normal person would simply click “mark all as read” and be done with it, but I’m not a normal person. I don’t want to accidentally miss something important. What if I skipped over a whole week of feeds and missed the launch of a new Web 2.0 site? Okay, I’m be facetious, but you know what I mean.
Having a mind that gravitates toward solving problems, I started thinking about how to tackle “feed buildup”. This lead me to ponder the nature of a feed: it isn’t email where a person addresses a piece of mail to you specifically and is waiting for an answer. Rather it’s akin to a TV broadcast–a newscast really–where the information just flows out to an audience. The difference between a broadcast and a feed however is that a broadcast is fleeting. A feed on the other hand (depending on the feed reader that you use) will accumulate in your reader until you read it. It’s almost like a broadcast/email hybrid in that it is sent out like a broadcast, but it’s caught like email. This works great if you read your feeds regularly, but if you only check them periodically you’ll be overwhelmed with an overflowing feed reader every time you load it up. To deal with this you’ll more than likely select everything and mark it all as read, or you’ll quickly scan through it and possibly miss information that you’d normally want to read.
The trouble of information overflow isn’t going to go away, and with the rapid adoption of feeds by every Tom, Dick and Harry on the web, it’s just going to get worse.
Solving this problem requires a rethinking of feed management. I’ve come up with a few disparate propositions but hardly anything revolutionary or conclusive. Rather, I’d like to spark a conversation through which solutions may be found.
So? What are your thoughts? I’d share mine, but it would quadruple the size of this post.
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8 Comments
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July 3rd, 2006 at 8:36 am
Believe it or not but I am also reeling under information (read feed) overload right now and was in my reader doing some big time culling when I stumbled across this post of yours.
I classify my feeds into various folders depending on the content but each of these folders sits inside one of 3 top-level folders. The 3 folders are alpha (very important feeds), beta (can be read later) and sandbox newly discovered feeds that have to live here for some time before they are promoted to one of the other 2 folders).
What’s your solution?
July 3rd, 2006 at 10:59 am
I think the best strategy is to prioritize feeds based on:
1. relationship with the blog publisher - for me reading and commenting on my RL friend’s blogs is the highers priority. Because chances are I’m going to talk them next day and they are bound to ask me what did I think about that topic about which they posted.
2. entertainment value and personal preference - I tend to read the funny, silly and entertaining feeds first - just because they entertain me. I also tend to read my favorite feeds at the same time - because they are important to me.
3. average post length - some bloggers tend to post brief, to the point entries that include a link, or a comic panel and short commentary. Other post long, detailed and thought provoking articles (Freedom to Tinker comes to mind). I tend to leave these for later when I can actually take time to appreciate them. The long winded posters usually tend to have low post volume over time so that works out great.
4. post volume - some blogs have a new entry once a week. Other ones churn out 10-20 posts a day. I tend to read the low volume ones first, and leave the high volume feeds for last.
Once I read through all my firiends, favorite and funny blogs, and check out all the brief posters, I tend to scan through high volume blogs.
I do not read all the articles. I scan titles for interesting stuff, and look at the pictures. I only stop when I spot a heading or an image that piques my interest. If I’m strapped for time and I don’t feel like scanning certain feeds I left them unread.
If I spot a feed that oscilates close to 200 unread entries for weeks or months at a time I usually unsubscribe from it. I’m not reading it anyway, so why keep it there.
Once I’m done with the high volume posters, I get to the long winded entries.
Of course this is when I’m in a catch-up mode. I usually have my Bloglines up all day in a background tab, so I tend to catch posts as they come in. So I read the high volume blogs in 5-10 post chunks as they show up.
The only downside of this method is that when you do a rapid scan through the accumulated content on a high volume blog, you may easily miss out on some good stuff.
But I just don’t know any better way. The only alternative is to read *all* the posts. It may drive you absolutely crazy, especially if you see that slashdot, boingboing, digg, arstechnica and fark have 100+ accumulated posts each.
July 3rd, 2006 at 12:02 pm
I favor a 4 step approach :
Step 1: Select all unread items
Step 2: Mark as read
Step 3: Open a beer like “scandinavian” man
Step 4: Drink, relax and look at the clouds… and if you see one shaped like a Web 2.0 startup logo, grab another beer until it passes.
More seriously, i would reconsider the true value of “being informed” and what it means. It useless to accumulate gizzilions of factual details scanned at light speed if you dont take the required time to assimilate them. No matter how much feeds you will read, the ratio of “I know vs. I dont know” will still be a fraction of you chances to will the loto.
I usually split each items of my information diet in three categories: “Must Read Everything (10%)”, “Read if time(65%)”, and “Read if I require cheering up(25%)”. Join this to a HEALTHY daily “time limit” for feed reading. Ho… and stop when you feel stressed doing it.
Another way to rething the issue by considering you “time/attention” as if it was money: Why spend such a big chunck of your daily salary on reading RSS… what do you really gain from it?
I found out that passed a certain “stress limit” it becomes pretty much useless.
A formula to calculate such stress limit can go as : (TimeSpent * Echo Posts) / (Really Relevant Items Found + Time a laugh while reading)
July 4th, 2006 at 10:08 am
Varun, Luke & The Schmu: Very good suggestions… especially the idea about categorizing feeds by levels of importance. I would do that but that would mean more work on my part ;) Right now I just open all the posts up, scroll down and click on anything that catches my eye. I do have a mental “categorization” if you will, in that I pay more attention to the posts of certain people. But like the Schmu said, i think it’s a good idea to remember that it isn’t as important to read everything as my mind makes it out to be.
Varun, my “solutions” were more theoretical and included systems that would automatically filter content based on keywords, usage, and a global classification system. Haven’t really worked it all out yet though.
July 4th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Instead of classifying the feeds in categories with wrong semantics, the RSS software editor could provide an “importance” flag for a new feed. (why not 3 or 4 levels of importance).
Also, why not provide an “on vacation” mode (with possibility to specify dates), where it only catches posts that fits a particular query (e.g. : CATCH all posts FROM category “something” where tag like “web dev java” AND length < 20 lines).
These 2 solutions does not answer the problem, nor they are candiates to modify any standards. I think, the solution resides in each one’s information organization, like we did with email. Software editors must be the ones bringing these kinds of solutions … if they want us to use their stuff.
JS.
July 7th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
The have become decidedly more selective with the feeds I choose to subscribe to. I find I enjoy my browsing much better when I read a smaller number of high quality feeds (feeds that adhere to my own personal preference) than a large number of relatively standard or boring ones. However you’re dead right that the problem isnt going to go away any time soon, and to be totally honest, I dont think it can. There is just too much information out there now. RSS is like everything else; rely, use (perhaps abuse?) it too much and it is going to cause you problems eventually. However, I do like JS’s “importance flag” suggestion above.
July 7th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
I think that adding importance flags or tagging to RSS is not going to solve the problem.
Importance flag is an ok idea as long as everyone agrees to use it properly. If 15 out of 20 daily posts in a high volume feed are marked as important, this does not help you at all.
Tagging has similar problem. If you tell your RSS reader to remember only entries related to AJAX, Web 2.0 and Google you may still miss a whole lot of other cool stuff. For example tagging approach would not work with BoingBoing wich specializes in collecting odd, and strange internet news.
Tagging would also be ineffective for a feed that specializes in Web 2.0 news - as every entry would be tagged as such.
In both cases you will still see a significant buildup of unread feeds, and loss of interesting stories. So you are back to square one - only now both the blog author and blog reader are doing much more work placing and interpreting all these tags and flags.
In my oppinion, it’s not worth it. Just limit the number of the feeds you regularly read to a minimum, and don’t be affraid to remove the ones you do not read from your OPML.
July 7th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
I think that the best way to manage feeds is for the system you’re using to read them to be aware of the popularity of the information it’s dealing with. How? By analyzing the number of people who read the same posts you have and deploying sensor drones into the world the measure the impact of every post on the world at large. You know, did my post on adopting Linux impact the planet somewhat, less than somewhat, more than somewhat, or not at all. ;-)