RSS Reset: Home Stretch

July 6, 2008 – 9:20 am

rss-kids It appears that I am behind with my weekly update on the RSS Reset project.  This is probably going to be my last update on this project, and in my last paragraph I’ll make an effort to determine if I felt it was a success or not.

A Quick Recap

I started the RSS Reset project with Corvida just over a month ago.  Soon after that I listed my starting feeds.  A week after that I wrote an update on my personal progress on the project.

Recent Activity

I’ve added a lot of feeds and gone through a bit of turmoil in Google Reader recently, so I’m going to have to play it by ear with how I develop the documentation.

The two or so weeks after my last update I concentrated on adding feeds.  Below you’ll find a list of feeds I’ve added, grouped by category.

A lot of the smaller blogs belong to fellow FriendFeed frequenters.  All the links above go directly to Toluu if you want to view recent entries and/or add them to your reading list.

As you can see, I added 7 exception blogs and a bunch of blogs of unknown size.  This sort of blows my 10-feed exception limit out of the water.  Also, quite a few smaller blogs are in the 300-500 subscriber range.  I decided that under 500 was still acceptably small.

So, that brings my total RSS feeds in Toluu to 103.  The number of subscriptions I show in Greader is 95.  Hmm.. that’s not right!  I have a theory of why the number would be lower, but more on that later.

Big Jump in Shared Feeds

A few days ago, I asked people to send me a Google Talk invite in a FriendFeed post.  This resulted in an explosion of shared feeds that expose me to new and interesting articles on the internet.  I went from 6 or 7 direct shares to 28.  Also, this effectively doubled the number of unread articles I get per day, pushing it up to around 300 – 500.  This is still better than then 1100 – 1500 that I was getting before the project.

Plus, now I can email or chat with 20 more cool people then I could before.

Feedly Fun

A couple of weeks ago Louis Gray broke news of a new Firefox-based application called Feedly.  This is a beta plugin that integrates tightly with Firefox and gives you a nice portal page view of information that it gleans from the places you have visited, such as Greader and other places.  It is very slick and has some very nice features, that you can read about on the link I provided earlier.

Without getting in to a lot of detail (you can read about here, but I will say Edwin has been very responsive), Feedly messed with my feed configuration, adding some new feeds and removing others.  I am incredibly sensitive about my Greader feed config especially because of this project, and it just came at the wrong time.  So, I am still recovering a bit from that, and for the moment am not using Feedly at all.

This may explain why I list 103 feeds in Toluu but only have 95 in Greader, and I know there are a couple of differences in feeds (I added a couple of personal and biz feeds directly).

Conclusion

Well, I’ve been putting out some observations as I go along, but I will re-state them here:

  • I have gone from a core of 40-odd feeds to over 100 in the course of a month.
  • I don’t think I am finished adding feeds, even essential feeds, yet.
  • I still have much less volume coming through than I did pre-reset.
  • I don’t think I have too many big gaps in my feeds, except surprisingly, certain high-volume feeds such as io9, Gizmodo and CNN.  Additionally, these feeds are either not shared by anyone on my shared feeds page, or they are not subscribed to them either.
  • I have a much broader view of a niche (social media) and the topics du jour than I have in the past.
  • FriendFeed has given me a quick, easy communications channel when I have a social media project in mind, such as when I put a call out for more Greader shared items.
  • I’m not going to go back to my old OPML, I don’t think, but on the other hand I don’t think I will do a full reset again in the future.

I hoped you got something from this project, please do take a look at my profile on Toluu and find a few new blogs to add to your reading list!

Shout-Outs

I wish to thank Corvida for co-conspiring and planning this little caper, Caleb Elston for his excellent application Toluu, Jeff from (jeff)isageek.net, Rashunda from The New Media Diva and Caleb again for taking it upon themselves to do their own RSS Reset, The Google Reader team and the FriendFeed team.

Here is where you can find me:

Tags: , , , , , ,

Related posts

Viewing 2 Comments

Trackbacks

blog comments powered by Disqus
scribkin is proudly powered by WordPress Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS). Theme by Bob