Avid Reader

I got off a bit easy on this assignment since I'm already a big user of RSS/readers. I've tried a few different ways of getting my news feeds over the years, and I'm now pretty happily settled with Google Reader. I like my trusty GR for a couple of reasons - first of all, it's browser-based, so I don't have to worry about saving/downloading/syncing things on my home computer vs. work vs. my iphone, etc. I also like that GR allows me to follow my gmail contacts and see things that they've shared through their accounts - this is great for discovering new things to read & keep up with what my friends and contacts are reading. And I can share things with them as well, which is great. Lastly, it is pretty helpful to me that GR isn't too picky about how you format feed URLs when you add them. It's nice to be able to just put in the URL of a site I'm thinking about without having to go hunt down and copy the exact feed URL.

One thing that I can never really seem to get "right" with my RSS feeds is how to organize them. It isn't really a problem, but I always seem to be vaguely dissatisfied with whatever I have for my current setup. I keep going back and forth between having lots of specific folders with a few feeds in them (i.e., a folder for "Library," a different one for "Technology," a third for "Job Ads," etc.) versus fewer, more general folders with more feeds in each. My current setup is the latter, and I have just 5 folders at the moment:

• Professional
• Friends/Family
• News/Culture
• Style/Design
• Tech Training Program!

By far the hardest to keep up with is the "Professional" category - both because I have a large number of feeds in this folder, and because they tend to be more prolific and require more attention to read. Whereas I can just sort of flip through news blurbs or fashion posts while I watch TV, I have to actually sit down and pay attention to most of my professional feeds, so they tend to back up. It definitely isn't that I'm less interested in these feeds - probably the opposite is true, but the greater attention they require from me makes it more of an endeavor to sift through them.

Even though I have my feeds grouped into folders, I tend to read each one individually. If I see have 10 unread items from my Friends/Family folder, I'll expand the folder and click on each individual feed's title, reading all the new stories in each one before moving on to the next. I tend to flip through the feeds that have the least number of items and/or generally take less time to read and then move onto the more time-consuming feeds - this is how I generally like to approach complex projects, by getting the quick and easy tasks out of the way!

I have a lot of feeds that I follow, and they are constantly changing. How do I decide what to follow? I'm pretty willing to stick just about anything into my GR and give it a try, but there are a few things that will get a feed deleted pretty quickly. The biggest offender would be overpublishing - some of my favorite blogs/sites to read are ones that I don't follow in my reader, because they simply push too many stories out each day. A couple of examples here would be Jezebel.com and Mashable.com. Putting one of these feeds in my GR is a great way to have 1000+ unread items after a couple of days. There is just no way I am ever going to sift through that much content. Also, I know that if I visit either of these sites at any time there will be lots of new, interesting content. I prefer to use my reader to collect stories from sites that don't update as frequently and I don't want to waste time checking to see whether or not they've been updated. As a general rule, if a site publishes multiple interesting stories per day then I'll just visit the site and read them there, but if it publishes less frequently I like to pop it in my reader and just let the new stories come to me when they're available. 

Another reason I would remove a feed from my GR is if their site doesn't actually publish the content of the stories in the feed, just the headlines. This drives me CRAZY. I understand that the site needs pageviews for advertising, but that doesn't make it less frustrating. It really breaks up the flow of my reading to have to open a page up in another window or tab - particularly on my phone or ipad. This isn't to say that I delete ALL feeds that fall into this category, but I have to really like them to deal with it. A couple that I tolerate this behavior from are ProfHacker and the Annoyed Librarian - but I tend not to keep up with these feeds as well as others that I can read right in GR.