Never leave the scene of an RSS feed without taking action

Well..in short, I have been using RSS feeds (I was an avid Newzcrawler fan but I needed something that worked right inside of outlook). I did not see much sense in having two different applications, one for my email and the other for RSS feeds.

So after much experimentation and trying the top 5 RSS aggregators (not including some web based aggregators), I came to the decision that I would shell out some cash for Newsgator Inbox (which I think is definitely one of the best RSS aggregators out there). You can download a trial version here.

I think RSS aggregators and RSS in general as a technology is going to go big in the next few years. Imagine the innumerable applications RSS could be used in.

For those who are un-initiated - here is a quick recap of what RSS is.

One of these days, I intend to post a detailed review of my experience with RSS aggregators and a comparision of some of the best ones I've laid my hands on.

Now, coming back to the title of this post. I've realized after months of using feed aggregators that too much information could be indeed, well, too much..

So I've a simple rule of thumb (well 2 rules of thumbs, one for each) -

1. Always keep an eye out on how many feeds you subscribe to. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you are subscribing to 20 or 30 or 40 or even more number of different feeds. Triage through your feeds, removing and adding feeds frequently. Personally I tend to limit myself to about 20 different feeds ( a couple feeds for news, a couple for buisiness and so on). If I find I'm not using a feed that often, I will just delete it.

2. Once you get to your feeds, each post you come accross should be dealt with right away. Either read it completely and then decide if it's worth keeping, and if it is, decide if it's one of the best reads on that topic or not, flag it if it is and keep it aside. If you don't find the title and the first few lines of the post anything interesting, do yourself a favor, just delete it. You might think you will get to it some day, but every day you will have tens or hundreds of posts coming into your aggregator and you will not have time to go back to posts from days ago.

Oh, and by the way, once you have settled on your feed subscriptions, make a back up of it (export it as an OPML file and keep it somewhere).