Pay for a feed reader?

But you have Google Reader, why would you need anything else?

The problem with RSS feeds is that they are like tattoo collecting:  easy to get but eventually one runs out of room. I love reading broad and ranging topic from all corners on the Internet, tech news, design blogs, high literature, long-form stories, random photoblogs and odd tumblogs. I was originally skeptical of RSS, but once I bought in, I at the whole hog. I tried to pull a Scoble. I read thousands of blog posts a day, I was a info-junkie.

Eventually I learned that it was not sustainable. I could be a normal human being or I could be consumed by my feeds. I have gone back and forth between reading too many feeds and too few, feeling like I was missing something.

For the past 3 months, I had managed reading only 15 feeds regularly, with 5 or so, irregulars that I visited via bookmarks. I was happy with that amount, it was manageable without being disappointingly meager.

I shy away from sites like Digg because the wisdom of the crowds quickly turns into the stupidity of the masses, linkbaiting and meme chasing, all of which are the temporary high or intermittent reinforcement that the addictive Internet can breed.

When I saw feedafever.com show up in my feed reader multiple times and the concept intrigued me, I broke out the credit card. A personal Digg, a recommendation engine for the self, with a built in feed reader. Sign me up.

Fever is an interesting piece of software, it requires a server with PHP and MySQL, taking it out of the realm of the desktop and creating a personal webapp like WordPress TK. This captures the appeal of similar products like Google Reader, making it available everywhere. Fever also includes a slick chrome-less iPhone “app”, so my feeds are always in my pocket.

The magic of Fever is the recommendation engine. Feeds are broken into two broad categories: Kindling (Must reads) and Sparks (Occasional, infrequent reads). Using some magic and some link comparison, Fever ranks what is “hot” on the Internet basing popularity on the normal body temperature of 98.5. The more popular an entry or term, the hotter the temperature is. Fever ranked as 117.8° on the day of release.

Fever does two things for me, allows me to read what I want and find out what topics are hot in the Internet. The recommendation engine also shows which blogs are part of the echo chamber. In the first few hours, it became very apparent that some sites are either incredibly self-referential or contain a lot of cross posting (I’m looking at you Boing Boing). Fever let me unsubscribe from quite a few blogs, because I know I am catching the hot stories from them.

The odd thing is, Fever works better the more feeds that are thrown at it, so I am subscribed to a lot more feeds. An interesting part of the excellent execution of the feed reader is that new feeds can be automatically added as a “Spark” providing it as grist for the recommendation mill. If I find a blog continues to show up in the “Hot”, I can infer that I might want to add it to the “Kindling”.

So far, Fever has been a success and a $30 (plus hosting) I find it to be quite a steal for such an interesting service.

[rate 5]

She had learned of it through the knitting community that she was becoming part of and while I had heard the term RSS, I had always associated it with a desktop client. Being tied to a single computer didn’t fit my living in “the cloud,” (or at least having multiple computers). Bloglines was the greatest discovery of 2004/2005.

As soon as I found Bloglines I became a voracious feed reader. At one point I had over 600 feeds to read daily, which meant much of my life was spent in front of a computer screen, not really getting a whole lot done, but, boy the sweet, sweet nectar called knowledge was good.

When Google released their reader I was initially skeptical, like I am with most products. Is it going to work the same, how is this better than what I’m using. It was not as clear as it was when I went from memorized URLs to the RSS reader. In fact, it took some good old fashion convincing.

I have spent the better part of two years living in Google Reader. The “shared” items feature was killer for me, a way to let my wife, coworkers and friends know about what I found interesting. I was still reading about 500 feeds initially and soon realized that it was a pace that couldn’t be maintained.

After I read the 4 Hour Work Week, I realized that I reading a lot of duplicate content. Engadget would report on a product that would be picked up by Gizmodo, which would then be discussed in depth by another blog which would eventually make it on to Digg. Needless to say, reading the same story 4 or 5 times was not only boring, but not very efficient.

Early in January 2008, NewsGator released NetNewsWire for free. NetNewsWire has been and in my opinion still is the best RSS reader for the Mac desktop. It has the added benefit of syncing with NewsGator’s online service, which means read my feeds on the go as well as at my desk. Being able to juggle my feeds between work, home and mobile. It is a big change to read feeds from a client as opposed a web interface. But a good change.

The mobile interface is very pleasant and the iPhone interface is actually superior to Google’s allowing me to leave items unread, add them to my clippings, or if not wanting to read the page, I can click a single link which will mark the entire page read. Plus the slick iPhone interface is easy to navigate and use.

I feel like I can have a web browser open without having my feeds be the first thing that gets in my way. I also like how I am still able to share items, but also flag them, and one of the nicest feature of NetNewsWire is the feed statistics it keeps. It will let me know which feeds haven’t been updated so I can prune them. Google Reader did something similar, but I had to do the analysis, not the program.

During the run up to my switch to NetNewsWire, I had started to reduce the number of feeds that I read. Down from 100 to 70. From 70 to 50. From 50 to 30. I am now down to 28 feeds. Not just 28 average feeds, but those feeds a further filtered down.

Using Yahoo Pipes, I have been able to take the feed from Digg and reduce the total number of items in the feed by getting rid of items that have less than 125 diggs. That is further refined by getting rid of all items are in the sports category, those who know me, know I don’t care for sports. I have used the same technique on McSweeny’s (filtering only for lists).

The other service I have found that has dramatically reduced the noise from the signal is AideRSS. AideRSS uses the PostRank algorithm on a feed and looks at the number of comments and social network adds, crunches the numbers and spits out 4 categories of posts, All, Good, Great, and Best. I have used this on almost every popular blog I subscribe to, and it has reduced the rush of information greatly.

Slashdot has some really good stories, but there are also a lot of duds. I hate having to wade through them to find the gems. AideRSS helps me by reducing the number of posts that I see to only the best of what Slashdot has to offer. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to love the posts that appear, but it does reduce the clutter. Boing Boing is the same way.

I have even used AideRSS on my favorite feeds, including Lifehacker and Unclutterer. With this reduction, I am able to check my feeds once a day as opposed to once an hour. At one point, I felt like Robert Scoble and I were competing for who could read more feeds, but now I will graciously cede the title to him, I have far more important things to do.

Coming soon: Reducing inputs – Part II – Email