HOW TO: Manage YOUR RSS Feeds

If you're anything like me, you'll find that you have trouble keeping your RSS feeds under control. Here are a couple of useful articles to help you improve your RSS-fu.

1) Group your RSS feeds by context, not subject

Matt Wood suggests that you group your RSS feeds as you read them. Rather than grouping your feeds by topic (not always easy to do), group them by the way they fit your day. Matt suggests the following

News

Feeds from traditional news outlets. Matt reads these first thing in the morning

Can't Miss

Essential reading: his friends' blogs, blogs where he posts, etc.

Skip 'em

Stuff he wants to read when he has the time. What I'd call "grazing", I suppose

Not News

A combination of the Can't Miss and Skip 'Em groups (Google Reader's folders make this pretty easy to do). He reads these later in the day.

I don't know if this is the best way of organizing stuff, but the whole contextual approach (grouping stuff by how you use it, rather than what it's about) is very much part of the Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy that 43 folders endorses. I rather like it...

2) Use a collection of tools to keep your news where you need it

Marshall Kirkpatrick (who writes for Techcrunch amongst others) explains how he keeps on top of thousands of blog posts a day by combining a set of tools. He (sort of but not explicitly) divides things into:

active monitoring

Once an hour, he checks his Netvibes account for high priority feeds. Once or twice a day, he checks Google Reader (for everything else)

ambient monitoring

He uses Gmail's Web Clips (the little stories that run across the top of the page if you use Gmail) and Snackr, a scrolling ticker, to monitor his priority feeds.

alerts

He uses Zaptxt, a RSS to IM/SMS alert system, to alert him to high priority items.

I'm a big fan of this right-tool-for-right-job approach: the more important this stuff is to you, the more you tend to want to specialize. I'm already using three things to do this (Netvibes for at-a-glance monitoring, Google Reader for my must-reads, and RSS FWD to push stories to my mail) but on the strength of these, I'm going to revisit... I think you have to find the way that suits you best, but reading through these two articles will help get you started... How do you organize your feeds?

how to, rss

Comments

[Chris]

I think Matt might be onto something there. Obviously it's a case of everybody finding their own feed management methods but contextualising feeds seems to be one which would work for me.

It makes sense. News in the morning, when it matters most in most of our jobs, and everything else arranged by priority type. I like it, currently I do find myself scrolling through a lot of material. Needless to say I manage my feeds by subject.

[Brendan Cooper]

This is something I've been intending to do for some time - thanks for the pointers.

I like the idea of combining Netvibes for quick display with Google Reader for more in-depth browsing/searching/archiving.

I actually use my blog for really quick snapshots - that's what the RSS feeds do down the right-hand side. I get five stories from PR, social media and tech whenever I look at it, and more often than not, at least one of them is interesting enough to take action on, whether to comment or post about it.