November 28th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Over at Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders (who recently sent a schwack of traffic to this old post), I read Wood Tang’s interesting theory on reorganizing your folders in you RSS reader. It makes a lot of sense:
So it dawned on me to group my feeds by the way in which I want to read them, not by topic. If there were some feeds that I didn’t mind missing, and some of which I wanted to read every single word, I should organize them that way, not by their putative subject areas.
He suggests categories like ‘Can’t Miss’, ‘Skip Them’ and so forth. I could combine this with feed filtering from AideRSS and consume more of my feeds more efficiently.
8 Comments »
October 31st, 2007, 4 Comments »
James recently hooked me up with an invitation to FriendFeed. They offer a mega-feed of all your social media activity. It’s kind of a web-wide version of the Facebook news feed. For me, that amounts to these services:
Those are my blog feed, deli.cio.us bookmarks, Digg activity, Flickr photos, Google Reader shared items, Last.fm ‘loved’ songs, Ma.gnolia bookmarks and StumbleUpon activity (they have a bunch of others, like Twitter and LinkedIn, that I don’t regularly use).
Holy crap. Who in their right mind would want to see all of that in one place? It’s my stuff, and I don’t even want to see it.
It’s telling that James sent me an invite for this service. We trade links back and forth quite regularly (James, here’s some live Weakerthans). We used to use Ma.gnolia to do this, but have since recognized that that’s just an extra step. We now rely on good old email.
Theoretically I might want to monitor James’s FriendFeed for stuff that interests me. Except, of course, most of what interests James probably won’t interest me. That’s true for any two people–there’s far more chaff than wheat. We filter the information that we send to each other, thereby imbuing those links with meaning. I don’t want the raw feed.
More Than I Signed Up For
I’ve got a related pet peeve about subscribing to blogs. Without mentioning it, a blogger will add to what was appearing in their RSS feed. They might, for example, add Flickr photos or bookmarks to their previous blog posts-only feed. This bugs me, because I’m no longer getting what I signed up for. I usually contact the blogger and request the pure blog post feed. Hopefully FriendFeed doesn’t exacerbate this problem.
When I think about FriendFeed, there are only two ways I would practically use it:
