01.31
My endless quest to organise the information flowing into my life continues; in this case, switching to Google Reader.
My pattern in getting info from websites has been basically:
* Visit them all manually, and usually forget.
* Repeat until RSS was invented & enough sites carried it (or equivalent) to make it worth switching.
* Use Thunderbird as an RSS reader, as it was the best of many.
* Not have time to read the feeds and fall behind.
* Use Livejournal as an RSS aggregator, to force me to read them.
* Realise that I’ve added so many feeds, I never keep on top of LJ and often don’t even bother, Thus Missing Out, which is even worse.
* Create LJ friends filters to screen out the heavy ones.
* Realise that doesn’t work, and I’m still missing out.
* Move to Google Reader, which not only combines items into one stream as well as show them per feed, but also shows them as details like LJ (no click-read-close), but also marks them as read as you look at them, no intervention needed. A-ha, how will this fare…
Like so many others, I now seem to be using Google for pretty much everything. Except Reader doesn’t allow authentication of feeds, so my spanky friends feed doesn’t work. Still use Thunderbird for that one…
I don’t think I could cope with LJ as an aggregator for my non-friends feeds because a lot of them I scan quickly to pick out the one thing in five that I want to read, whereas I read everything my friends on LJ write
I’ve just cut back from reading about 200 feed to about 100 though which I hope will help a bit.
It worked for a while – but the sheer volume of spam (Digg Technology, stand forward) meant I started missing stuff going on in people’s lives.
Ironically, turning my flist into a feed helps me keep on top a bit more…