Web Worker Daily

Last Friday, I was attending Portland’s weekly Beer and Blog event, and I stumbled across what later turned out to be an interesting trend. I had two separate, unrelated conversations about an hour apart with people working in the technology industry who once used RSS readers but had mostly abandoned them in favor of using Twitter to find news and interesting blog posts. I talked to a couple of other friends and posted the question on Twitter, which confirmed that many people are using Twitter as an RSS reader replacement. Read the rest of this entry »

I remember when Dave Winer introduced Really Simple Syndication (RSS) in Radio Userland way back in 2001. At the time, the biggest problem was finding sites that had available RSS feeds. Today, it’s rare to find a site without feeds.

Despite feeds becoming a regular part of web sites, people continue to struggle with how to use them, and don’t want to have to schlep from site to site to find feeds that might interest them. Enter topic-based readers. With these services, you don’t need to seek out sites that cover the topics of interest to you. Instead, search for those topics and the service delivers what it thinks best fits your needs.

I’ve yet to find two sites offering topic-based aggregation doing things the same way. So your best bet is to try out the different services and see which suits you. The features you will most likely want to look at are topic selection, usability and “scannability.” You’ll discover that some sites are easier to use than others, while some do a better job of selecting and saving topics. The following four sites deliver content by topic to simplify your task of receiving content that interests you (Twine is another topic-specific aggregator that we’ve covered previously.) Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about more efficient RSS reading through pruning, filtering, prioritization, keyboard shortcuts and more. After spending some time reading the comments on the post and thinking about how I use RSS, I realized how many of my feeds are outside of the typical feed used to read blogs or other news. While RSS is a great way to keep up with blogs and other news sources, it can also be used for so much more.

I try to keep updates out of email, so I push as much as possible into my RSS reader for those items that I want to keep track of. As a web worker, so much of what I do relies on being able to keep on top of new information and find the conversations that people are having about the many activities where I have some type of involvement (blog posts, organizations, my consulting services, etc.) I’ll illustrate this with a few examples.

I get many of my blog post comments as RSS feeds instead of email, especially for the high volume blogs, like WebWorkerDaily. While this is straightforward for single author blogs, it took a little work to get a feed of just the comments from my own WebWorkerDaily blog posts. I ended up writing a custom Yahoo Pipe to come up with a feed that worked for me.

I also use many vanity feeds to track mentions of the various activities that I’m involved with across multiple organizations. Most of these are complex Yahoo Pipes that track mentions across blog posts, Twitter, Flickr, video sites and more with filtering to clean up some of the noise. I even posted a two-minute video demo for how to create a quick and very simple vanity feed using Yahoo Pipes. However, vanity feeds don’t have to be complex. You can track the feed from a Twitter search and a blog search in your feed reader to find the most important mentions, without getting into more complex methods. Read the rest of this entry »

Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine tune your RSS subscriptions and prune them down to the feeds that provide you with the most value. I spent some time over the Thanksgiving holiday reviewing my feeds and getting rid of the poor performers, which really helps me get more value while spending less time in my RSS reader. However, pruning is not enough. I also use quite a few filtering techniques to further reduce the clutter.

My favorite filtering techniques involve Yahoo Pipes, which looks and sounds much more complicated than it is. Jackson West described Yahoo Pipes pretty well when he called them “hard to grok, but snazzy“; however, Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have to be quite so difficult for people to understand. The first time I looked at Pipes, the interface scared me away until a friend of mine gave me a very quick demo that showed how easy it was to use. After using Pipes for while, I gave similar demos to help other friends get started and even recorded a 2 minute introduction to Yahoo Pipes that shows how to use Pipes to filter RSS feeds. How complicated could it be if I can explain it in a 2 minute screencast?

Here are a few of my favorite filtering techniques that I use to find the most relevant content. Read the rest of this entry »