Orders of magnitude and overload

As I sat at my PC at gone midnight last night, doing email catchup, reviewing comments to various blog posts and RSS feed scanning, I thought - this is ridiculous. I have various software tools that are supposed to help me be more productive and all I'm doing is spending more time on a never-attainable quest to actually be more productive.

Take RSS feeds, for instance. An RSS aggregator is a great piece of software, a great tool that brings you things automatically that saves you lots of time so that you don't have to visit loads of different places out there on the net yourself.

I did a quick count of what's in Feed Demon, my aggregator. There are currently 682 individual RSS feeds spread across 42 different channel groups. As has been the case for some time now, there's just no way I ever get to see all of this information. Of the 42 groups, I actually have 6 that I do scan every day. Those 6 contain not far off 100 individual feeds. (I've also got one group that I call "Keep an eye on from time to time" So why is this one of the groups I actually look at every day?) The rest I sometimes scan. Yet seeing all those channel groups every time I maximize the little FD icon in the systenm tray is beginning to give me feelings of anxiety.

This is all becoming a major problem.

Then one feed caught my eye - a great post yesterday by Marc Eisenstadt on Corante Get Real in which he talks about my problem:

[...] RSS aggregators, as a way of managing zillions of feeds, always struck me as something of a short-term fix for the problem of how to deal with, well, zillions of feeds. They are of course a critical daily tool, and the real benefit for me has always been providing a 'radar alert' to keep in touch with what I'd like to call 'thought leaders' (forget 'A-list' and all that nonsense): the people and services who, in my opinion, have something to say to me.

My conjecture is that tools like this (e.g. RSS aggregators) give users, especially early adopters of new technologies, a two-orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 100x) 'power boost' in dealing with the 'knowledge flow' (forget 'information' and 'content') whipping around us. Indeed, such tools are particularly valuable in helping foster and even accelerate knowledge flow among other early adopters (who tend to correlate highly with the 'thought leaders' involved in the knowledge that you want to be, well, flowing)! But whenever there's a three, four, five, or six orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 1000x, 10,000x, 100,000x, or 1,000,000x) increase in 'adopters of new technologies', not only are such technologies not new any more, but a two-orders-of-magnitude 'power boost' is insufficient, so we turn to new technology to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

So it looks like my problem is an order of magnitude thing. Or the signal-to-noise ratio. Or something. Of course, it may also be something to do with my less-than-perfect organization of self in how I do things like email and read RSS feeds, but I'll pass on that for the moment (as well as my constant email guilt trip).

It's now clear what I must do - delete all the RSS channels and feeds that I don't get to, meaning I will likely end up with just the 6 channel groups I scan every day. Marc's post is the catalyst for this realization, so thanks Marc. The Spring clean starts this weekend.

And by the way, the Get Real RSS feed is a full content feed, not an extract or headlines only. That's the smart way to publish and thus consume information in an RSS aggregator (here's why I think so; and this post as well). If it had not been full content, I wouldn't have read Marc's post (and it actually wouldn't have been in my aggregator in the first place).

How are you managing zillions of feeds?

Comments

[Jeff Clavier]

1) Since I use NewsGator, I can use the "search folder" capability of Outlook to build criteria based views. One is "Unread Mail" which shows all posts which have not been read yet. Another one is "Quick Read" which shows me the posts being available in a (manual) selection of feeds, which I would define as my "must read".

2) Since I browse the "unread", I rely very heavily on the title to decide whether I want to look at the content of a post. Depending on the number of unread, I might zap through hundreds of posts in a few minutes.

3) I flag posts that are either too long/complex to read (Red), and these I need to comment upon (Blue).

4) If a post is more than 48 hours, mark read.

[Richard Byrom]

I use bloglines to read feeds since I have two laptops, two desktops and a PDA that I can read feeds from at any time during the day and trying to get feeddemon synched on all these would be a mission. Hopefully that will all change with the acquisition.

What I've decided to do is set myself a max. no. of feeds being 500, right now I only have 150. When I get to 500 I'm going to cull my list so that it stays at the maximum. Off course I might decide at that point that I can manage more but I think it's important to determine if you're managing and if not cut down the list - there are only so many hours in the day.

I have also set up a number of watch lists in feeddemon on my most used laptop. The watch lists have product names (like Oracle) and people (like Scoble and of course myself).

[Allan Jenkins]

With FeedDemon and RSSBandit, I rarely could manage more than about 100 feeds. But I started using GreatNews, a desktop aggregator, last week & am very pleased.

Gives you several ways to view feeds (I like the newspaper look, since it makes scanning posts a breeze), lets you give feeds individual settings (update every xx periods, update only on command, etc). And has all the other features you'd want in a reader.

I'm pretty impressed -- first time in weeks that I've gotten through my blogroll every day.

I posted on it here http://allanjenkins.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/05/greatnews_the_i.html and you can go fetch it here: http://www.curiostudio.com/index.html

[Neville Hobson]

Guys, thanks so much for your insight. Food for thought, mostly making me think more about how I actually do feed management. I'm sure I'm not doing it very efficiently.

Jeff, I do like your 2 and 3. I should do something similar.

Richard, setting a max number of feeds looks smart, definitely. Once I prume my channels down to 6, I'll fix a max :)

Allan, I took a look at GreatNews, too. Very nice, but for me it doesn't offer more than I can get from FeedDemon. Indeed, it offers less in some areas, although I know it's still beta.

[Neville Hobson]

Oops, hit the wrong number keys on the keypad. Jeff, it's your 3 and 4 I especially like - I already do 2!

[Lee]

And of course, with all this feed reading, we get to see our wives *when*, exactly...?

It's now 2am, I've just sent off my report for FIR39; I've been out all evening watching son play volleyball (so no champagne, sorry... sparkling -- for me and good lady wife).

And I'm about to spend another few minutes posting on my blog...

How does your wife cope with your nocturnal habits, Nev -- coz mine goes mental at mine! {grin}