I love the convenience of RSS, but one of the problems of life inside the feed reader is that once you find a few dozen feeds you want to follow, the cost of adding a new feed becomes too high. When you find a site you like, you think, “Gee, I want to subscribe — but do I really want to add another feed? I can’t keep up with the ones I have!” (I know that the casual “River of News” approach, where you just let the stuff stream by you, would mean no guilt over not keeping up, but I haven’t achieved that level of Taoism detachment yet.) So over time we stop adding new feeds to our RSS diet. This perpetuates the “first-mover advantage” and makes it harder for newcomers to gain subscribers. (They still can, and do, of course.)
Here, as I mentioned in my BarCamp post, is my idea for a feature that RSS readers should but don’t (as far as I know) have: a sort of “New Feed Probation” or “Test Drive” zone. New feeds you subscribe to are automatically placed here (unless you deliberately put them somewhere else). They remain here for a preset time period (a week, a month, whatever you choose). At the end of that period, your reader flags the feed for you, tells you how much you’ve read it, and asks whether you want to keep it or not. You can see whether you actually ended up reading much of it during the “trial period,” and make an informed choice.
Sure, you could do all this yourself, manually. (I do, sometimes!) But wouldn’t it be nice if the reader helped you with this clerical task — and, in the process, encouraged you to explore new information sources and blogs?
[tags]rss, feed readers[/tags]
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That’s how I use Google Reader
New feeds stay untagged and are read last. If I like them, they get a tag and become part of the family. If I don’t like them, bye-bye.
I also have a “too-many” tag for those blogs that I’d love to read but never get the chance.
I use the opposite approach in Google Reader… I have a special tag for new feeds called “1-Sandbox” (I number my feed tags so I can control the display order). I check the feeds in there individually first, then switch to the river of news approach with ‘All Items’. If I find myself skipping over stuff in the Sandbox, it goes away, anything that’s been in the Sandbox ‘for a while’ gets an appropriate tag and is moved out of the sandbox.
The feature I REALLY need (because I can’t do it manually) is the ability to ‘pause’ feeds. This was a really handy feature on my old client reader.
Gosh. You want …
one click subscribe
one click unsubscribe
no folders\ categories\ tags
Yes. Google Reader makes subscribing and unsubscribing way too cumbersome. Tags are a waste of my time: you’re in or you’re out.
Amen, toivo: one click to rule them all!
-danny
I use a “New Additions” folder in Bloglines. I put all new feeds here. If I notice myself reading a particular feed in this folder a lot, I move it to a permanent folder.
I also like engtech’s idea of a “too many” folder. I used to have a “too much” folder, in fact. What I ended up doing with almost all of the entries in this folder was to create a little web page (local to my machines) with the canonical URLs for the listed entries, and then I deleted the “too much folder.” Now, if I’m out of something to read, I visit that page I built, pick a blogger, and try not to worry too much about the hundreds of posts I’ve probably missed.
As for automation: I’d like my feed reader to flag feeds that I haven’t read in a while, and periodically ask me, “Prune?”
But your main points are right, Scott. It’s hard to get rid of existing feeds, it causes a feeling of dread to contemplate adding a new one, and the end result is a feeling of anguish about not keeping up with one’s reading.