
How to Hack RSS to Reduce Information Overload - kevruger
http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-to-hack-rss-to-reduce-information-overload/
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icefox
There seems to be two forms of 'news' that unfortunately rss readers try to do
both of them. The first is feeds from sites that update 20+ times a day and
the second is that blog that updates once every three months. The first is
just there to read if you have the free time while the second you always want
to read every single one. You can create two wildly different user interface
optimized for the two modes rather than what we have today which is the best
of neither.

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gte910h
I use different folders for the two types (Non-pro and Firehose (and
professional for lead sites))

I hit mark as read on the firehose and lead site ones all the time.

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mikeklaas
In my opinion, RSS is "good" for one thing only, which is aggregating a bunch
of rarely-updating blogs into a single location to check.

Following something like techcrunch.com in an RSS reader – let alone with
unread counts – just seems like madness to me. I realize some people do it,
though.

(Incidentally, this is precisely the problem my startup is trying to solve.
You plug in your RSS feeds and it will assemble a personal "hacker news" of
things you should be reading. iPad-only for now, though: <http://zite.com>)

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Jebdm
I basically don't read anything online except through RSS feeds. My strategy
for dealing with high-update sites is twofold. First off, I don't subscribe to
redundant feeds (since many sites offer highly-overlapping content), and I am
very trigger-happy on the unsubscribe button.

Secondly, I make use of this highly customized neural network-esque technology
I use which gets a finely-grained history of everything I do and uses it to
build a model of importance by which it can filter out irrelevant content.
It's a bit processing intensive--it can only filter through 30-50 items per
minute--but it's not a big deal since my RSS feeds only produce less than 500
items a day, so that's only 10 to 20 minutes of processing per day. It
produces (on average) only a couple of false positives (items I don't actually
care about) per day, and (although of course it's hard to empirically confirm)
it seems to produce similarly few false negatives. This is a huge gain over
every other system I've tried (especially populist voting-based systems).

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petercooper
I saw a similar post a few days ago but specifically for developers. Applying
Service Oriented Design To Yourself: Information Stream Management:
[http://blog.darkhax.com/2011/03/22/applying-service-
oriented...](http://blog.darkhax.com/2011/03/22/applying-service-oriented-
design-to-yourself-information-stream-management)

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kevinburke
I also built this tool to delay RSS feeds until after I finish work, you
should check it out - <http://rssafter5.appspot.com>

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rkudeshi
For me, the biggest improvement in information overload has been simply
unsubscribing from any blog that updates more than two or three times a day
(Marco.org, keep; TechCrunch, remove).

Instead, I subscribe to their Twitter feed and any story important enough that
I missed seems to find its way to me in other ways (e.g., here on HN).

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mcclanahoochie
I listen to my RSS feeds via FeedSpeak for Android : <http://feedspeak.tk>

