death to feeds
by Christopher Blizzard
I like to read the various web logs I care about offline. That is, being able to download them and read them when I’m stuck on that 6 hour plane ride across the US. For a long time I’ve subscribed to the various planet feeds. Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Fedora, Classpath, Mono, etc. And it turned out that there was just too much traffic and not enough signal. Wading through it with the little time that I have is just not enough. So I decided to make a rule: no more planets. I went through and figured out the people that I was interested in instead of the topics.
In the end I managed to get it down to under 100 feeds. Not too bad. But I think I care about the opinions of too many folks.
I would caution against this, it is the first step on the spiral to groupthink. A month from now you may tire of the opinions of some of those you seldom agree with and drop those feeds in the name of efficiency, rinse and repeat.
Funny that you should mention that. I, too, am worried about that. But you know what? I just don’t have time enough to read what the people I know well post, let alone explore at that level. So I’m going to have to let my friends do some of my filtering for me.
You may end up missing out on new people who get added to the respective planets, so you’ll need to check back now and again for new people.
Yes I think this is where future newspapers (or news-flurgs to coin a new term that no one will use) may come from. There are millions of blogs and a lot of them have useful information. Getting people to choose which ones were the mose useful in framing current events, important ideas, etc. The problem is getting a revenue model around it that works (convincing people to a) trust their time to other people, b) trust the decisions of these people, and c) paying for that work)
Now to find some venture capital, some known good editors, and get news-flurg.com registered.
Woudl you be more likely to stay subscribed to the planets, if they were ~exclusively topical?