Bloglines or Google Reader? How To Effectively Keep track of your RSS Feeds
When it comes down to being on the top of any industry, there is no question blogs and forums RSS feeds are an effective way to go. By keeping track of industry website, it is easy to stay in touch with the latest development and pounce on new opportunities. But going through your bookmarks one by one to check out the latest information is not only ineffecient, but also time-consuming. That’s why nobody is doing it anymore.
Most people I know have switched to RSS feeds nowadays. The modern browsers such Flock and Firefox come with integrated RSS feed reader which means you can keep track of your favorite feeds right on your browser. But if you are keeping track of more than 5 or 6 feeds, using your browser as your RSS feed reader becomes really inefficient. That’s where Google Reader and/or Bloglines come in.
For a long time I used Bloglines to keep track of my favorite blogs. It’s a very convenient, and it does the job brilliantly. The problem with Bloglines is that it is easy to get lost in Bloglines top 1000 blogs, and sometimes you end up neglecting feeds that are vital to your industry. That’s one reason I switched to Google reader. There is no doubt in my mind that Bloglines is more user friendly. But feeds in Google reader can be read similar to your emails on Gmail. So you can skim through useless content and get to the more important content faster, without neglecting more important feeds.
Whether you are using Google Reader or Bloglines, it is important to understand the notion of information overload. There is such a thing as too much information. That’s when you add as many feeds as you can to your feed reader. By doing that, you are going to be left with 100s or 1000s of new posts everyday, and you are going to burn out if you try to keep up with this magnitude of new content everyday. So here are a couple of steps that I take to keep my sanity when dealing with feeds:
- Moderation: you’ve got to avoid going to extremes with your feed reader. You should treat your feed reader like your plate. Don’t too much on your plate. Just like food, there is so much information you can take in.
- Take Baby Steps: when I started using Bloglines I added 100 feeds to my feed reader and tried to keep up with them. Now I understand that I should have started with 5 or 10. Taking baby steps is the best way to go with it comes to information management. If you can handle ten feeds easily, then add another ten. There is no need to know everything that is going on the web.
- Look after yourself: I have a few friends who have gone no extremes and burned out by trying to absorb lots of information on a daily basis. Even if you can read 200 blogs a day, it doesn’t mean you should. There are other things to do when running a blog or business. You can read 20 hours a day and do nothing for months or you can read 1 hour a day and do something in the remaining 19 hours.
- Clean up your reader: keeping my feed reader tidy keeps me productive and more effective. I usually go through all my feeds once a month and take out the ones that I feel are not must read. Blogs change, and you shouldn’t keep up with blogs that are not up to your standards.
