Clearly any time you have to travel you fall behind in a slew a different arenas: work, friends, family, etc… One area that particularly gets to me is my blog reading.
I read something like 40 different blogs on a regular basis. Most of them only post something 2-3 times / week so it’s easy to keep up. But some, like
Digg,
Engadget, and
Gizmodo have hundreds of posts per day. This means that when I get back home (as I just did), my RSS reader (
google reader) has more than 1,000 posts to go through.
The decision I am presented with is: do I a) read them all, b) read some of them, or c) mark them all as read and move on with my life. Option (a) is clearly out of the question. (B) seems appealing, but then I always feel like I’m missing something. (C) is what I usually wind up doing, but then I worry that I will be left out of the loop.
What do you guys do? Is there a strategy for catching up on 100s or 1,000s of posts? Help!?!
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My approach is to scan through the headers very quickly and pick five or ten that I really want to read, and skip the rest. If something important happened, there are usually several feeds who have picked it up and I’m more likely to see it that way. Also, this helps cut down on the not-so-important stuff.
To get a nice sense of progress, I usually start with the feed that has the most unread items and go from there. Really makes your unread count go down very quickly.
Good luck, in any case!
Hi Prof
I look at it this way…
My paper boy delivers my newspaper every day. If I go away for a week, I might read the latest one upon return. But I don’t feel compelled to go through them all and read every article. Old news is not news I want.
So if you use the newsreader to read ‘news’ I’d apply the same principle and use option (c).
However, if you use RSS as notifications of things you don’t want to miss, then I’d use option (a).
Best strategy I think is to separate ‘news’ feeds from ‘notification’ feeds. Use separate folders in google reader for each type, and assign the feeds to the folders accordingly. Then it’s easy to look at all your notifications and just scan the news if you are so inclined.
Sounds like the high volume feeds like Digg, Engadget, and Gizmodo should be in the news folder and you low volume blogs should be in notifications folder.
To put it another way, RSS is not email.
Hope it helps.
Cheers,
Tim