Open Thread: How Do You Read RSS Feeds?

March 8th, 2007 (11:53am) Anne Zelenka 56 Comments

Leo at Zen Habits has published a series of productivity hacks including number 8: “Simplify your information streams, and plow through feeds and email.” Here’s how he puts this into practice in his feed reading:

Reading my blogs is a good example: I use Google Reader, and when I check my feeds in the morning, I use the “view all” mode, where I’m reading all the blogs at once. I use the mouse wheel and just scroll down through them all, reading the headlines quickly. If I see a headline that sounds interesting, I’ll click on it to open in a new window to read when I’m done, then continue to scroll through the rest of my unread posts. I can quickly get through more than 100 posts this way. Then I’ll go and quickly read the posts I’ve opened in new tabs. If I don’t have time to read them now, I’ll bookmark them in a folder I call “Inbox” to read later. When I have time later, I’ll read through all my Inbox posts, and delete them (or save them elsewhere if I want to post about them). But the key is to crank through them, really only reading the really interesting ones.

This is similar to my own approach to feed reading, except I use the keyboard for maximum speed. I use Google Reader in List view (as opposed to Expanded view). When I begin feed reading, I use the keyboard short cut “ga” to list all unread posts. I then move through through the list with the “n” key to move down, “m” to mark read without opening, “o” key to read any posts of interest, “v” to open the original post in a new tab in case I want to bookmark or comment on it, and “s” to star anything I’d like to think further about.

How do you read your feeds? Do you use Google Reader or another aggregator? Do you wander leisurely through unread articles or try to plow through them like Leo and I do?

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56 Comments Post your own comment

Swapnonil Mukherjee says: March 8th, 2007 12:48pm

I read my feeds via netvibes.
The amount of information, that can be viewed on a single page with netvibes, is far greater than what can be viewed using the typical “Tabular View” of any feed reader.

I can have one tab named Web.2.0 on netvibes, on which I can add Techcruch, Web Worker Daily, Giga Om, Solution Watch, Scobleizer, 43 folders and Ajaxian.

This way,on even a smaller laptop screen at 1280 X 800 resolution,If I choose a 3 column layout, I get to see all of those feeds at a single glance.

No Feed Reader comes close to this, in terms of the sheer amount of information, that can be aggregated, by such a “Dashboard Style” approach.

It is simple common sense. Why do think newspapers, are laid out the way they are?
Netvibes, Live.com and google.com/ig have all just taken the same concept and adapted it for the computer screen.

Laura says: March 8th, 2007 12:59pm

I used to use bloglines, but I switched to Google Reader. Actually, I did so because I started using Google’s personalized home page and it was nice to have gmail and my feeds all in one place. It’s not perfect, but it works for me.

sal cangeloso says: March 8th, 2007 12:59pm

Google Reader is the only way to go IMO. This is an issue I have spent a fair amount of time looking into and I think Reader is the best way to get through your feeds in a reasonable amount of time, keep them organized, and not miss anything worthwhile.

I currently read about 110 feeds which is a lot of information to parse each day, especially in expanded view, but it is the best way I have found to now miss important information. You definitely need to prioritize and be able to skim to recognize what’s important…

wlw says: March 8th, 2007 1:28pm

I use Alesti, an online reader that uses the traditional Outlook-style format. The problem with almost all the others is that many feeds only give you a brief summary, forcing you to open a new tab to read the entire post. Imagine doing that with dozens of posts! Alesti has an embedded browser that lets you see the entire post right there.

Swapnonil Mukherjee says: March 8th, 2007 1:31pm

I f you have to read 110 feeds on a daily basis, traditional feed readers are the way to go.

On the other hand, if you want to read about 30 to 40 feeds a day, a good start page like netvibes or pageflakes would be good enough, IMO.

Adam Kalsey says: March 8th, 2007 2:08pm

I use a combination of tools, with different feeds getting different tools. Some go in my feed reader, Gregarius, while others are delivered to my desktop over IM with Feed Crier, and others are delivered to my web site, River of News style.

I also wrote about how I use Feed Crier in conjunction with other readers to manage my daily feed flow.

(Disclosure: I’m the founder of Feed Crier)

Eric Gruber says: March 8th, 2007 2:41pm

I bookmark my feeds into folders on Firefox (on my Windows and Linux machines) and Safari (of course, on the Mac). Works fine for me. I’m not a fan of applications that only read feeds when the browser I use will do it for me.

Kurt Rosenkranz says: March 8th, 2007 3:15pm

I’ve spent a lot of time playing with different feed readers, but I’ve settled on a three-pronged approach to reading feeds:
1) I’ve set up ten custom feeds (usually 10-20 similar separate feeds combined) using Yahoo Pipes that weed out duplicates and sort the content of my feeds. They also weed out entries with specific words like “Apple” (I don’t have a Mac).
2) I view my Yahoo Pipes feeds in Google Reader
3) I view my most commonly accessed (cnn, cnet, etc) feeds as bookmarks in FireFox.

It works great for me.

Jim Willis says: March 8th, 2007 3:25pm

In NetNewsWire. I have an Alerts group of important feeds (comment feeds, etc.) that updates automatically. A daily group with weather and news feeds that updates at 8AM and a weekly group with all of the blogs I read that I update manually when I have time to kill.

rick gregory says: March 8th, 2007 3:49pm

hmm… there are two aspects to this. One is the issue of productivity and how one moves through a lot of information that is regularly updated. The other question is why we have so many feeds we subscribe to. After all, if you’re reading 10% of the posts that hit your feed reader, is there utility to having so many subscriptions?

I’m going to start with the last point – there IS usefulness to having a lot of subscriptions even if you don’t read most of the posts since every once in a while a gem will pop up from a feed that you may have passed over fro days or even weeks. If the cost of maintaining that subscription is low and the occasional payoff is there, why not subscribe? Added to this is that multiple subs will show you trends.. are several people all commenting on a point? Hmmm… pay attention to that. And you have several opinions all right there.

All that said, I don’t like the “scan headlines” approach used in isolation. It’s too dependent on the poster being a good headline writer and in some cases (Wil Wheaton for example) the headline is deliberately not expository. But.. damn it makes it easy to move through 100+ posts.

What I do is combine this with a second filter. I use Google Reader and look at all items in headline view, reading what catches my eye. I’ve also tagged some feeds as “Daily” meaning that I really want to cglance at them every day if I can. I leave this expanded and, once done with the headline scan I look at the feeds in the Daily group. If I see unread posts from a source I usually find to be valuable I click on that feed so I can see that they’ve written. Often enough, I see posts whose headline didn’t catch me, but which is interesting.

Too often the emphasis on getting through lots of feeds really fast leads to the ‘I’m uber since I get through 659 feeds in an hour” attitude. The point of feeds shouldn’t be about making sure you power through every available bit of information out there, but about enriching your personal and professional life with information that you find interesting or valuable (both hopefully). Too often we focus on personal productivity and getting a lot of things done… occasionally we need to step back and ask why we’re doing those things in the first place.

Just Mohit says: March 8th, 2007 6:01pm

I used to be an uber-feed-reader till about a month or so ago…till i changed for good. I use bloglines, and still have about 60 feeds, but 10 of these belong to my friends’ blogs, another 15 are top writers who only write once a month, and about 15 at any given time relate to whatever subject i happen to be interested in.
I totally agree that if you are chasing too many feeds, no amount of productivity hacks will help you stay in control.
That said, thanks for the link…and the good work you guys are doing!

Mike Gunderloy says: March 8th, 2007 6:12pm

I’m definitely an outlier: I read 400+ feeds, 30K or so items per month. For that level of reading, I find it essential to have an offline reader that lets me work through things at my own speed without waiting for anything. At the moment I’m using NewzCrawler on Windows, which offers me a good three-pane all-feeds-in-one view where I can quickly move through all of my unread items, scanning headlines and summaries. When I see anything I want to follow up in depth, one click pops it into Firefox for followup and Alt-Tab puts me back in NewzCrawler to move on to the next item. Using a client-side reader also has the advantage of giving me permanent storage of as much as I want, which helps when information is your business.

Micro Persuasion says: March 8th, 2007 6:55pm

How I Read Feeds

Web Worker Daily has a good thread going about the best way to read RSS feeds. Here’s what I do. I bucket my feeds in the Google Reader into a bunch of different folders. I put about 30-40 in my

Blog Mirrors » How I Read Feeds says: March 8th, 2007 7:17pm

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Logical Extremes says: March 8th, 2007 7:38pm

I used Safari’s bookmarks bar since it became available, until today when I switched over to Google Reader. The main pro is the reduced distraction of the numbers popping up in my bookmarks bar all day long. A side benefit is being able to use any computer and know where I left off. Keeping feeds in one tab makes it easier to ignore them until I’m ready. I tend to use expanded view and look at individual feeds or folders, as the context helps me pace and filter what is important. There are some quirks to Reader, but I’m going to stick with it for now.

tomorrowsplayground says: March 8th, 2007 7:51pm

I use Netvibes. No problems so far. I sort feeds by type (tabs) and scan titles. When I see a title I like I read it (within Netvibes). If it’s good…I’ll generally click ‘read all’ and scan the other articles to see how they fair.

Attraction is all in the titles / subject headers.

I wonder how many people consider this when writing a blog post?

Ron E. says: March 8th, 2007 8:00pm

For me there is only one way: NETVIBES!

I feel so alone when I can’t reach it ! It’s become an addiction, I have my weblife organized in there, it’s great. I’d recommend it anytime :)

Ron E.
http://brandcurve.com

Leo says: March 8th, 2007 8:19pm

Thanks for the link to Zen Habits, and great discussion on reading feeds.

I’d like to comment briefly on Rick Gregory’s excellent comment about the amount of feeds we read. If you read my original post, Simplify your information streams, and plow through feeds and email, you’ll see that I advocate cutting down your feeds (and other information coming in) to only the most essential. Too many of us have a bloated amount of info coming in, including feeds, email, mailing lists, newsletters, magazines, paperwork, voicemail. It’s unproductive, because you have to wade through all that info to get to what’s really important. I regularly weed through my stuff, unsubscribing when it doesn’t give me value.

Productivity isn’t truly productive if you are doing work that is unnecessary. And productivity should be used, IMO, to give you more time to work on your personal goals, not to do more work.

Great discussion, guys!

D. Lambert says: March 8th, 2007 8:40pm

+ Google Reader. I used to use RSS Bandit, but I can’t give up Google Reader’s ability to keep all my feeds up to date on any PC. I just sit down at any computer, pop open Google Reader, and I’m off and running. The one-click shared feed feature is pretty cool, too.

Kyle says: March 8th, 2007 8:50pm

Google Reader. I use the list view, in the collapsed view, and use the j/k shortcut keys to plow through roughtly 100-125 posts a day.

I love Google Reader.

daveconrey says: March 8th, 2007 8:55pm

I’m reading for two different reasons, either looking for items that might spur a story on my own site or looking for items for my own consumption. I use Google Reader and I organize all the feeds into categories like Tech, Business, Marketing, Diversions, etc. I go through each folder one at a time and skim. Similar to Leo, things that catch my eye and I want to take a better look at or I may want comment on, I open in a new tab to read later. I also do this if I’m collecting links for my Links of the Week post, but only to bookmark them under my “Blog Consumption” folder.

If something is reasonably short but worthy of reading right away, I’ll do it right from the reader. If something is lengthy, but not necessarily timely or not for my blog, I’ll STAR it in Google Reader and get back to it later.

Of course, I reserve the right to do something completely different just because too much regiment gets me all crazy.

The Zone Read » Blog Archive » The Best Way To Read RSS Feeds says: March 8th, 2007 9:42pm

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Sharandeep Brar says: March 8th, 2007 10:33pm

I use Netvibes using different tabs such as general, javascript, mails etc. and completely satisfied by it till date.

Amit Bhowmik says: March 8th, 2007 10:57pm

Read over 100 feeds daily? Work on a mac? Then you must check out Vienna. It’s free, very capable and faaaast. I’ve used it for more than a year and its served me well.

When one crosses the 100+ mark in feeds, I don’t think a web based reader can be as productive… simply because one HAS to be connected to view the content. However with a newsreader software, one can simply download the updated feeds, read them on the move, flag articles of interest and view the flagged ones whenever net access is available!

Cheers…..

Dominik says: March 9th, 2007 12:58am

Hi,

nothing much to say Anne, I read them almost exactly like you do, just that I use the expanded view initially.

Diego says: March 9th, 2007 3:13am

I click on the feed links in Google Reader. Look at the headlines and if there’s something I line I open it in a new tab. I continue all the way down my feeds like this. Sometimes ignoring some which aren’t as popular with me as other, especially if I don’t have a lot of time. Once I have tabs open with all the blog posts I’m interested in I click on “All Items” and then click “Mark All As Read”. This way all the unread items in all feeds are marked as read. Then when I return another time to Google Reader I have a clean slate and don’t waste time scanning items I’ve already glanced at.

iDevLabs.com says: March 9th, 2007 7:48am

I have the feeds I read most often and always have good content on my Google personalized home page. The rest I put in Google Reader and just scan through them quickly.

Philippe Borremans says: March 9th, 2007 8:47am

Using klipfolio for years now…. It allows for keyword based alerts so I do not have to go through all the feed results, only the ones with my keywords in there… Great for online monitoring and free.

Easton Ellsworth says: March 9th, 2007 9:00am

I’ll reply at my blog in more detail. Great thread. Just switched to Google Reader for the speed – NewsGator is awesome but its new AJAXy beta is sluggish.

Jennifer says: March 9th, 2007 12:01pm

I use Google Reader. I used to organize by folders, but lately I just have them all in one big list. I click on one feed at a time – whichever seems interesting – and scroll through, scanning to see if anything looks worth reading. I mark good stuff with the “share” button so that the links show up on my blog.

Right now I have 249 subscriptions. If I’m finding a feed boring for more than a couple of days, I unsubscribe.

Anyone else getting “scroll finger”? :)

kate farber says: March 9th, 2007 12:07pm

i use google reader and am diligent about filing feeds into their respective categories (pr, blogs, news, social media, personal etc). using google’s “personalized trends” i know which feeds i tend to read the most, which feeds i most often “share” or “star” and which tags i use most often. if i share an item, i revise the tags so that i can easily search for articles later.

like leo, i usually open all the links i think may be of interest in separate windows to be read later. i use the space bar to scroll through most feeds, except for those from digg/del.icio.us which i scroll through using the mouse trackwheel.

kate farber says: March 9th, 2007 12:09pm

re: “scroll finger”…i hooked up a second mouse so that i can scroll through feeds w/ my left hand.

hober says: March 9th, 2007 12:30pm

I wrote a bit about my feed-reading habits in February.

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gbchavez says: March 10th, 2007 12:13am

I’ve been using Feedable, and I’m liking it quite a bit. It’s new-ish and still has some kinks to be worked out, but I feel there’s a lot less needless clicking around than with Google Reader. For my needs (I have about 30 feeds that I check regularly), it’s been ideal.

sinha says: March 10th, 2007 10:14am

I use newZie, probably one of the coolest feed reader [compared here]..
I sort feeds as A1 [i.e. the most fav ones] and then the regular folders…[Biz/Sports/etc..]

Christoph H. says: March 10th, 2007 12:27pm

I’m using Google Reader, too, but I read feeds in a different way. Normally, I open Google Reader twice a day, so there are between 50 and 100 items to look at. I take the “all itmes” mode and press “n” to jump to the next item. Interesting items are marked “shared” by pressing “strg + s”. The feed of my shared items are displayed in the bookmarks of my Firefox. So I can easily look at interesting unread news from weblogs.

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David Scott Lewis says: March 11th, 2007 3:59am

Posted a couple of comments at Micro Persuasion: http://tinyurl.com/74swn

As we race to absorb so much (too much?) raw data and information, are we reflecting enough to acquire and create knowledge? This is really to Josh Bernoff’s point (but as a former VP at META, maybe it’s an analyst thing that we share in common).

I guess I pretty much do what you do, but I’m not a happy camper. I’m currently juggling Bloglines (with several accounts, although focused on two primary accounts; I consider this a legacy system for myself), Google Reader (three accounts), and the Omea Pro Reader (which I personally believe is the best — although I’m going to give GreatNews a try).

Big bucket: My public Bloglines blogroll: http://doiop.com/public/DSL

Smaller bucket: Bloglines with restricted feeds, but also integrated with e-newsletters. Yes, I know that there’s a Greasemonkey script to do this in Gmail, but I’m not too sure I want to do this. The Bloglines format seems a bit better, but Bloglines shouldn’t limit each feed to the last 200 posts … which is one key reason why I also use Google Reader. I don’t want blog posts to overwhelm (in count) my e-newsletters, so having them fully integrated doesn’t work for me. (I realize that it might work for others, but it doesn’t work for me; I tried it, I didn’t like it.)

Omea is good in that I can have my e-newsletters extracted from an Outlook account which POPs the mail from a Gmail account. Hence, I can have e-newsletters in one part of Omea, feeds in another. And even better: I’ve created workspaces that allow me to receive posts and e-newsletters (even other e-mail) AND store files, all focused on a specific project, subject area, whatever. Nice Omea feature. The power of Google tied to Outlook and combined with Omea. It’s not as eye-spinning as it sounds.

But, to my point, none of these methods are really very good. There has to be a better way of handling information overload. It’s not about better IR techniques (although they’re nice); it’s about usability and the UX (user experience).

Final point: I even run searches within my Bloglines public account (the one noted above) and create RSS feeds from this. I hope Google Reader is planning something similar, although I suspect they are.

What I’d like to see you comment about, Steve, is how you use bookmarks. You know that I’m a die-hard Furl user and fan (and you abandoned Furl so you could be cool and del.icio.us): I’ll take digital library features over coolness any day of the week. But I’d love to comment on this because I have some ideas that combine Google Browser Sync, Google Desktop and Gmail File Space (not a Google product or feature) for making a much better Furl. It’s not perfect from a social bookmarking viewpoint (although it’s not bad), but it would be a helluva PDL — Personal Digital Library.

==========

Forgot something: I use various tickers comprised of blended feeds. One of my blended feeds is: http://feedblendr.com/rss/3030 (and it includes one of my favorite blogs, Micro Persuasion!!).

I run RSS Ticker (1.8.10) in Firefox with my Feedblender feed, and include a few other feeds that don’t work in Feedblender (for example, e-newsletters converted to RSS via RssFwd).

Not perfect, but another safety net of sorts to make sure that I don’t miss something.

BTW, does anybody know of any PointCast (don’t shiver) push-type systems that put tickers on the desktop OR in a browser depending on whether the browser is open? Even better: A ticker that could be integrated to run seamlessly with Firefox, Outlook, my Desktop, Adobe, you name it. Might be a tough trick to pull this off, but it would be nice to have a ticker running at all times, regardless which app I’m using — and without needing to resize windows; resizing windows is a pain.

Timothy Chen says: March 14th, 2007 7:17pm

I use pRssReader on my PDA (Acer n300), and read my feeds offline, since there is no WIFI in my work place. And I use FireFox extension, Sage, as my main rss reader when I go back home. However, I can’t sync those read and unread feeds both on my desktop and PDA. I am looking for a rss reader compatible both for WM5 and XP.

tom says: April 14th, 2007 9:21am

Anyone have a solution to sync feeds to some form of PORTABLE device to read on the commute?

I can use mobile versions of google reader.. but then i end up waiting for pages and paying a fortune in data tariffs. Ideally there’d be a way to sync your news feeds every night to your ipod (plus any linked pages) and then read them each day. Marking any for follow up, so when you resynched that night it would automatically open any you wanted to follow up or comment on.

As for now.. i waste far too much time in google reader. Its a poor excuse for a RSS reader in terms of features.. but the auto-mark-as-read and infinate scrolling is great.

I like thelook of Rojo.. having readers “digg” good stories makes it easier to filter the good stuff from the masses.. but its not as handy as google reader.

I just wish some blogs would be more selective in their posts.. one or two GOOD posts a day or wek is better than 100s of junky ones.

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I work for an advertising agency in website production and the majority of my questions are technical and I am very happy with the amount of information out from blogs and bulletin boards. It usually is about specific topics, and therefore is not from one source. I have not found feeds to be helpful for reference, only for news. Search engines seem to be the best way to find the information I need, sadly.

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