Why My Feed List Is Soooooooo Long

Some people ask me why I subscribe to so many feeds. (Here’s my complete list, as an OPML file, which currently includes approximately 500 feed subscriptions.) Well, it’s all about how I use them. For me, different feeds serve different purposes.

On Nov. 1, Ross Mayfield contended in “Attention Saturation” that the maximum number of feeds a person can possibly tolerate is 150.

Obviously, that limit doesn’t work for me.

Here’s how Ross explained his limit, and my explanation of why I’ve vastly exceeded it…

Ross wrote:

“…What number of feeds we can possibly tolerate? The answer is about 150, the cognitive limit of our mental capacities to track social relationships. Sure, we can have more sources of information. But in abundance, we will rely on our social networks as the filter. ”

Well, I don’t object to 150 being a cognitive limit on tracking social relationships. I haven’t reviewed the research he cites, but it sounds plausible. And I do indeed subscribe to some feeds in order to maintain social or professional relationships. However, I personally use feeds for far more than that. For me, they’re a way to maintain my own personal library of current information sources. That’s a connectivity function, but not especially social.

I explained all this in the following comment, which I just posted to Ross’ article:

Hi, Ross.

I’m with J. Wynia [a previous commenter] on this one. Feeds can be a way to maintain connections, social-relationship style. But they also can be simply reference tools or content sources, too.

For instance, in my feed reader (Sage, a Firefox extension), I currently have nearly 500 feed subscriptions. These are sorted into folders.

At the top of my list are the approximately 30-40 feeds in my “must read” folder. These are content sources (blogs, publications, organizations) that are of current or ongoing significant interest to me. This list shifts daily with my interests and with new discoveries. Generally, as a new feed captures my interest, I bump one which has become less interesting.

I also maintain a folder of current topical searches, which deliver items from a variety of sources that match saved source criteria at places like Technorati, Google News, etc. Right now I only have 10 of those.

And of course I have a folder for “ego surfing,” so I can monitor how my name or weblog (http://contentious.com) is popping up in the public conversation.

Finally, I have 30 folders where I put all my other feeds, categorized by topic.

Usually, if a resource has a few interesting items, I’ll check it out for a few days in my “must reads.” If I decide to keep it, it’ll eventually bump down into my topical folders. I don’t check these every day, but I prefer to subscribe to feeds rather than make a bookmark because a bookmark tells me very little about why I might be interested in a site. I turn up a lot of surprising gems this way.

So the number of feeds I actively monitor falls well within your limit of 150. However, for me it would be counterproductive to avoid subscribing to more than 150 feeds. There are just too many ways I can use that information. I love serendipity.

- Amy Gahran
Editor, Contentious

Thanks to Easton Ellsworth of Business Blog Wire for recommending that I respond to Ross Mayfield’s article.)

If you liked my post, feel free to subscribe to my rss feeds

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on November 5, 2005 at 1:52 pm and filed under Amy's Adventures, Feeds (RSS), Resources. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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3 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

Thanks for the detailed information and advice in these posts — Declan is quite right about the need to develop good information management practices, but it is hard to get off the roundabout long enough to know where to start amidst the plethora of tools. I’d be prepared to pay money for good advice about this: a thorough test and comparison of furl and del.icio.us and Connotea, and whatever other tools I don’t know about, for starters. There’s probably a book in this — Amy? Declan? Anyone?

[Reply]

1. Pam Sykes on November 11th, 2005 at 4:02 am
Much of this attention-deficit argument seems to me to resemble people in the past complaining that they never have enough time. The answer there was good time-management practices; those that better organized their time found they could have enough time to reach a balance.

I think the same may go for information; so-called information overload is perhaps likewise about better “information management,” and using tools and methods to organize information in better ways.

I agree with Bill Gates — on the general theme, at least, if not his solutions :-> — that today’s problem is not information overload but information underload.

Rather than theorize, I think it’s probably useful to get real-life feedback from those people who don’t find hundreds of RSS feeds the slightest problem — au contraire — and why, and who rather flourish in the new information-rich environment we have.

[Reply]

2. Declan Butler on November 6th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
One way to vastly improve the efficiency of handling large numbers of feeds is to use your RSS reader in combination with an online reference manager such as Connotea. As a journalist, I want to keep tabs on a wide range of topics, including many that I’m not currently working on but will be at some point in the future (as well as subjects I’m interested in personally).

I have my 200 or so feeds delivered simply as one list with the latest first (I hate subfolders), which I can skim quickly to spot possibly interesting posts/articles/resources. I just right-click entries to open each in a new tab in Firefox; then its easy to quickly scan each individual item, and judge their interest. Some get read in full, others get skimmed.

But the interesting point is that with one click one can post the interesting items to Connotea, tag them in seconds, thus creating a personal archive; a continually evolving little subset of the web, with the tags organizing the archive.

This means that when I return to a subject, eg the use of geographical informations systems in disaster relief, I can easily find relevant articles I spotted earlier. Finding them is facilitated by use of tags in a Boolean fashion, in this case: all posts +GIS +disasters. See:
http://www.connotea.org/user/Declan/tag/GIS+disasters

An aside is that others sometimes also find these collections useful, as in essence you are sharing the effort you put into researching/watching a topic — see the Connotea refs in Kathryn Cramer’s Pakistan web links .

Another utility is that most of may articles in Nature, now carry a link to the relevant web resources collected through RSS and web searches. For example, for an article I wrote on electronic laboratory notebooks, all the web refs are public here.

With 102 refs, that may seem like a bit of the firehose, but for anyone interested in finding out about e-labboks, it’s actually a very select set of items, quickly skimmed, which can be an adjunct to the person’s own searches on Google or whatever.

Because of my long interest in avian flu I need to watch what’s happening daily, so I thought I may as well share my research with others, and use RSS to generate a sort of daily newswire that is a bit like a feed aggregrator except that I first select only those posts that seem interesting; see avian flu. This is firehose in the extreme, but again its easy to find all posts on a given subtopic of avian flu, say + avianflu +vaccines. But the main use here is temporal; many people just to the tag’s own RSS feed as an easy way of keeping up to date.

Without RSS there is no way I could keep track of so many sources, and I second the serendipity argument; without Connotea, there is no way I could manage RSS. Everyone has their own preferences and needs, and should go with what works for them. As someone whose job is about information and being aware of what’s happening, this sort of large-scale RSS handling works for me, but it might be beyond the needs of many others.

Declan

[Reply]

3. Declan Butler on November 6th, 2005 at 6:44 am