Geir Arne Brevik, February 21 2006:
RSS addicition and relevance vs. frequency
My name is Geir Arne, and I’m an RSS addict. I currently subscribe to 65 feeds, but have been close to 110 news sources in bad periods. Needless to say, that generates a lot of news to read, and I don’t know what’s the biggest problem; the time I use to scan through all the articles I’m not interested in, or all the excellent articles I actually end up reading.
As I’ve tried to deal with my addiction, I’ve become more and more specific about the feeds I subscribe to. I’ll try to analyze what kinds of feeds I subscribe to, and if there is a pattern to when I keep a feed, and when I choose to unsubscribe.
What do I subscribe to?
- Top news – This is feeds that updates quite often, from at least once a day, to several times an hour. It’s very important to keep as few of those feeds as possible. I have four feeds in this group now (BoingBoing, News.com, Lifehacker and the Norwegian media/pr/marketing site Propaganda), and it’s probably too much.
- My feeds – This is my fastest growing category, and the one I find the most useful. Here, I keep comments feed from GAB.NET and Flickr, referrer stats from Mint, and the feeds for group blogs I write for. I also keep my delicious and digg feeds here, for easy retrieval of bookmarked content.
- My friend’s feeds – Your friends gets happy when you know what they do on their sites. It’s also nice to follow the del.icio.us feeds for smart people like Johan, follow Ola Erik’s glamorous work and watch Suzanne’s daily life. A bit stalkerish, but mostly nice.
- Work – This is the category with the most feeds (20), and almost all of them are blogs (as opposed to industry news sites). I’ve tried to find the blogs from the top people in the industry, as they tend to say smart things, and point the way to other smart people.
- After work – This is where I put cartoons, mp3 blogs and other things that are smart, entertaining, a combination, or none of the above. Beware: You should not put too many feeds in here, or you’ll start wondering where the day went. My personal favorite these days: The A.V. Club
What don’t I subscribe to?
- Bad sites – You have to produce more than one good blogpost to be added to my subscription list. You have to keep the quality consistent, or else I’ll hit unsubscribe.
- Special sites, outside my usual area of interest – Yesterday, I linked to a watchmaker’s blog in my del.icio.us sidebar. It’s very good, but I can’t fill my life with all kinds of nerds, no matter how smart and entertaining they are.
- Overlapping link blogs – In the blogosphere, a handful of stories circulate at any given time. I don’t need ten feeds that both link to The Chronic of Narnia and the Optimus keyboard. I’ve found that BoingBoing picks up the most, and that Lifehacker’s news roundups cover the rest.
- High frequency sites – You may noticed that regular news sites like BBC News are absent from my list. Why? Because they update their feeds every fifth minute, and so make RSS a hopeless way to follow the news. Such high frequency needs editing by someone smarter than me. I either go to their front page, or turn on the radio.
What does this mean?
There are two notions in the world of blogging: update your site often, or no-one will visit you, and write something good, and visitors will come to you. There are still some truth to both, but I think the key is in the balance between quantity and quality.
Consider this: A good, but not excellent, site that updates eight times a day, can be seen as annoying and be deleted, while another site with the same average quality that updates once a week could be kept. Or to be more specific: If you update your feed often, you’d better keep it good. After all, the problem with RSS-addicion lies in the number of new items, not number of feeds as such.
How important is this?
Right now? Not very important, as I’m not your average web user. But if RSS goes mainstream with Internet Explorer 7, and the increasing popularity of Firefox, it could start to mean something in this sea of information overflow. For now, it’s only something to consider if you want have geeks like me visiting your website.
