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Are You Suffering from “RSS Feed Overload”?

June 5th, 2008 by Bob Bly

When Yale librarian Rutherford Rogers said “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge,” he could have been talking about Chris Schroeder.

In a speech at the Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA) conference this week, Schroeder, CEO of Health Central Network, said RSS feeds were a great way of keeping up with what’s new in your field.

He then showed a slide of his own RSS feed inbox and noted that it had 2,000 items awaiting his attention.

Mr. Schroeder, I have news for you: if you have 2,000 unread items in your RSS feed, then it is anything BUT an ideal way of getting information.

Schroeder and many other people I know subscribe to so many data sources, their RSS feeds deliver hundreds or thousands of items a week — more than they could ever hope to read.

I believe Mr. Schroeder over-estimates his own need for information — or is unable to distinguish between what he needs to know vs. what he would like to know.

In today’s information age, more scientific knowledge is published every 24 hours than you could read in 5 years.

The key to managing your information is to be more selective, not less. Ruthlessly unsubscribe to e-zines, RSS feeds, newsletters, and magazines until you get only what you absolutely need.

Even then, you won’t have time to read even a small fraction of it. But at least your inbox will be somewhat under control.

But over-subscribing to free content via RSS feeds is an invitation to information overload disaster: equivalent to getting a Sunday New York Times delivered to your door every day of the year.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 5:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

43 responses about “Are You Suffering from “RSS Feed Overload”?”

  1. Fiona Fell said:

    I subscribe to 4 RSS feeds, and 3 of which are marketing based, and the 4th is my own to ensure my feed links are working out there for my audience.

    Three RSS feeds, and 2 newsletters. That is what I can handle reading at any one time.

    I add and remove from the 3 marketing feeds as they get filled with ‘crap’ but at this point the 3 I have at the moment haven’t changed for the past 4 months.

    I did a serious cull on my newsletter subscriptions also, to drop it to the 2 that help me regularly, and offer me value. (previously had about 25, so 2 gives me time to actually work!)

    Fiona Fell – The Profit Maximising Web Geek
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  2. Riel Langlois, comic writer said:

    I attended a seminar on RSS feeds earlier this week by David Warlick. He told us that one good strategy is to empty your aggregator every month and start adding feeds from scratch.

    (I just learned that an aggregator is basically a news reader like Netvibes or Bloglines, so this is the first chance I’ve had to use the nifty new term!)

    Having just started with an aggregator, I think this is good advice. (If you go a whole month without remembering a site, maybe it isn’t worth staying subscribed.)

  3. Kristi Holl said:

    I had to laugh that having 2,000 UNread newsletters and feeds was a great way to keep informed. We have this odd belief that because something is sitting in our Inbox awaiting attention that we’ve been informed.

  4. Jodi Kaplan said:

    Bob, I agree with you. While I have well under 2000 incoming messages, what I do have is too many, so I’ve been doing a lot of unsubscibing over the last few days.

  5. Stephanie said:

    I get so overwhelmed by my RSS reader. Silly, I know. I’m in the process of slowly killing my subscriptions – I mean, if a blog’s feed hasn’t been touched in two months, then clearly I’m not finding it that useful, right?

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