Reading by priority vs topic
Matt Thommes is thinking about Grouping RSS feeds by priority and frequency:
Feeds should be organized by how "important" they are to you - rather than simply grouping them together because they discuss the same topics.
Right. This is an idea I've been playing with for a while, but I've never gotten right because of exactly the problem that Matt discusses in his post. My first few groups are feeds that I want to read when I don't have time to read everything. But then the rest of the groupings are by topic, and I tend to read them scattershot, depending on my interest (and time) at the moment.
Possibly a bigger problem for me is that I have subscribed to far too many blogs. It's probably fortunate that many of them don't have anything new to say that often.
5 Comment(s)
I think the strict priority approach is pretty aggressive. With most feed readers, you can browse through the new items for a day pretty quickly. Generally, I know which topics and feeds need the quickest attention.
I find the priority method to be useful after a few days offline for travel or vacation. BUT, I know how to prioritize most of my topics and feeds. KM comes before the football and bicycle feeds.
I did find one reader that allows you to group by topic and priority: Attensa. It is outlook based. You can group feeds into folders. It also has a "river of news" which lumps all the feeds together, but you control the priority.
I have not used Attensa much because I prefer web-based readers that I can access at home or the office.
I use google reader and have feeds grouped by topic in different folders. I've been thinking for a while about creating three folders for different priorities (google reader allows you to associate one feed with many folders, similar to tagging) but this means more work. For the moment when I have a big "buffer" I simply go through each feed and mark low priority ones as readed.
said:
Lucas- The other thing about changing the way I read things is that it requires the effort of making the change, even if the final result will be "better." This is a challenge of change management that isn't always appreciated until the change is afoot.
Jack -
I just discovered that you can have it both ways, organize by priority and by subject with Google Reader. I posted on my website: http://kmspace.blogspot.com/2007/09/organizing-rss-feeds.html
Doug
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Hi, Jack
Actually, I take a different approach. I read by topic, but I'm constantly ditching feeds that don't matter to me any longer. My topics are actually whatever's of current interest to me, and I don't see the point of keeping feeds that aren't of current interest. So for me, topics *are* priorities for feeds.
Also, my feed reader (newsfire) groups feeds into folders. I tend to view headlines by folder, so I'm seeing everything most current in that folder. I rarely peruse by individual feed.
- Amy Gahran