Feed me

One of the biggest problems I have is keeping up with everything I want to read about what’s going on. I started with only a few websites that I visit daily a few years ago, and the list has grown ever since. Just keeping up with the regular news itself can be overwhelming. I settled on a system of bookmarks that I organized by priority, where I would just go further down the list the more time I had. The problem is that I rarely get very far down the list.

I’ve thought about using something RSS-related for a whlie, so I pulled some feeds into thunderbird, but I really didn’t want to know every time a site updated, especially something like BBC News. I liked that I was in control, so I visited whenever I had the time and would browse through things I missed. After all, we don’t all need to read every story and article that someone posts, right?

This might sound like a commercial, but they’re not paying me. Through a random link, I found netvibes, which is great just because I can use it as a universal dashboard for things like email and todo lists. The greatest thing about it is that it acts like an RSS aggregator. It pulls the 5-10 most recent topics into a window for each feed, so I can just browse what the most recent stories are without having to read through anything unless I find it interesting. I might be behind the curve, but I had an enlightening moment where I understood how useful it is. It’s also great since it’s a web app and I can access it from anywhere, so it’s always synchronized.

There’s still a problem though. Because it’s a live feed, I feel compelled to tab over to the netvibes page every so often to see what’s new. It hasn’t really cut down that much on the time spent and the amount of feeds I added are still overwhelming. One thing I’m noticing right away is how many stories I read that are duplicated everywhere. What I want is something that will scan through every feed I added and tell me which stories I should read. Maybe that’s what other people are for…