As I mentioned in my previous post, I saw Lucy Gray present at the ICE COLD conference this past weekend.  During her presentation on using Google Tools in the classroom, she touched on Google Reader, RSS in general, and some recommendations for best practices surrounding RSS.  One thing that caught my attention was her recommendation to teachers that they should over-subscribe to RSS feeds and then not really worry about getting through everything they had subscribed to.

I have to disagree with Lucy on this point.  I think there is a time and place to oversubscribe to news feeds.  When you are first starting out with RSS, it does make a certain amount of sense to subscribe to many sources of information.  Lucy’s audience probably didn’t have much experience using RSS and would need to spend some time experimenting to find the mix of sources that is right for them.  I’m totally OK with that.  Where I disagree is with the retention of all of those sources for the long-haul.

I’ve got about 50 feeds that I follow on a daily basis.  As you can see from my reader trends page,  I consume lots and lots (a very technical term) of news. At this point, I think that I tend to over-subscribe.  Many of the sources I visit are self-referential, meaning that several sources quote each other quite frequently, espescially when a story is big.  I also subscribe to several Meta feeds, like the News Gang feed that is composed of feeds from other blogs and twitters of interesting people.  I could probably cut down my feeds to about 25 and not miss any of the big stories, product announcements, or upcoming events that I am interested in.

I think the value in RSS is that if you pick your feeds carefully, and change them over time so that as you add new sources, you weed out some of the old ones that you don’t find useful anymore, what you get is a smart agent that starts to pick out the items that are of interest, without a lot of repetition.  This maximizes the efficiency of your access to the information which is really the whole point of RSS to start with.  Just having lots of subscriptions just isn’t useful in my opinion.  If you are using RSS as a store of information,  you are re-creating the wheel.  Any of these stories will be available for the forseeable future through a Google search, so its not like the information will be lost if you don’t have it in your reader.

Oversubscribe, assess the sources of valuable content, weed out the duds, maximize your efficiency… That is how I would reccomend someone get started with RSS.

One of the things I tend to do while browsing is to keep tabs open for a week or two at a time when I find an article that Interests me.  I typically find it through RSS in Google Reader then read it.  If it looks interesting I star or share it, assign it some tags, then leave it open in Firefox or Flock.  I leave it open because I want to read it a couple more times.  Typically I’ll re-read it after I find someone else who has commented on it.  I find that I take on a more analytical approach to evaluating articles when I can see how I react to other’s thoughts.  As I am sitting here watching TV and going through my feeds, one of the articles that I ran across talked about the most influential blogs.  One of the top blogs was Lifehacker… Is it a co-incidence that 3 of the 9 tabs I have open right now are Lifehacker pages?   I don’t think so… Great work Gina and crew!