Here's my rule: If a feed emits more than about 5 items per day, it's probably a shitty feed. And more importantly, that anything that is actually interesting on them will be repeated here, on Hacker News, or on Digg, or reddit, or on one of the feeds that I <i>do</i> follow.<p>I <i>largely</i> use my feed reader to make sure I don't miss stuff from the sites that publish much more irregularly (and so that I don't have to periodically check them).
Aside from some special-interest forums, I've ended up reading just HN.<p>(Warm thanks to you guys for being my filtering function.)<p>One by one, I dropped following various news sites from my Mozilla toolbar. I must say I never really bought into the RSS boom as the best sites I read were pretty simple and looked much like a beautified RSS layout.<p>First went Slashdot. This was years ago, about the time Reddit started. Reddit lost it last year: too congested with useless links with a low signal to noise ratio. I've been dropping many of my national news sites, too -- tech news and otherwise -- leaving only those of best quality. Then I dropped them as well because nothing much in the mainstream doesn't really interest me. This was a big thing I had to accept. I really don't have to know the details of some crisis that is 5000km away no matter how civilized or educated that may be considered; if I start hearing about a major change in the given situation only then I'll look up for some more news.<p>Last spring I dropped reading the website of the main newspaper in Finland. The news were mostly uninteresting except maybe for some local things. I still check their news listing maybe once a week but I rarely read any news items. I realized that I'll hear about anything important from other people anyway. So I'm effectively using my friends and co-workers as a live filter.<p>TV and TV news I dropped 10 years ago.<p>So HN it is. Then, plus a few web forums / mailinglists but those provide a mix of both information and connections to people. People are usually more interesting than the latest "facts" of random subjects.
There is another issue: a lot of quality content is not available in the form of feeds: event feeds, shopping feeds, feeds of modern art or last episodes of LOST available on Hulu.<p>Thus, an interesting opportunity is extraction + feed reader. You first extract and format quality content, then serve it to a user. Few days ago I released a demo: Photo Reader. Go check it out: <a href="http://semabox.com" rel="nofollow">http://semabox.com</a><p>I am actively working in the area of "semantic news". Talk to me if you are in the same field.<p>Yury Lifshits yury@yury.name
Sooner or later you'll have to create Your Personal News Agency. A reader or any aggregator is just the INPUT part of the job but how do you process and make available the generated knowledge, the OUTPUT? In a wiki or a blog post? None of them are semantic so inapropriate for storing knowledge.<p>Future Readers must focus on the output part of the process otherwise there will be so much input without proper output that everything will look like noise.<p>Signal vs. Noise is in fact your I/O rate.
I started using Snackr a few months ago and have been extremely pleased with it. It shows items from a list of feeds I can setup, but the items are displayed randomly. It has a ticker interface, no unread counter and a nice clean interface.<p>The only drawback? Development seems to have died on the project which sucks. So I'm just going on with the last stable release which creaks along
I would agree there is not much point subscribing to TechCrunch, Mashable et. all, But there are other types of content, like:<p>- friend's blogs<p>- vanity/competitor searches<p>- Niche blogs that you follow<p>[Warning: blatant plug coming]
I use <a href="http://friendbinder.com" rel="nofollow">http://friendbinder.com</a> to follow my friends RSS, Twitter,Facebook etc. in the same place. I don't use a feed reader for big news sites anymore - they are just too noisy.
I've written a similar URL-matching-between-feeds system for my own use: <a href="http://crowdwhisper.com/crowd/1/items" rel="nofollow">http://crowdwhisper.com/crowd/1/items</a> (the output is also fed to Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/crowds" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/crowds</a>)<p>The code is in Rails, and could use some bugfixing, refactoring and general TLC :) If anyone is interested, email niryariv@gmail.com for SVN access.
One of my biggest problems with Google Reader is those annoying unread counts. It makes it feel like email you have to get through ... so I quit Google Reader about a year ago, and started using Twitter as my new "Feed Reader". A stream you can check out when you want, and ignore when you don't want, is really nice. Plus, it's easier to whip through 140-character blurbs than paragraphs of text.
RSS seems well suited to feeds that update less than once a week, since I'll probably forget to check. For example my blog posting rate is about 1 every 2 months.<p>If a site updates at least once a day I'll probably remember to check it.