I’ve been writing about and trying various RSS Readers for quite awhile now as a way to keep track of my business information news and bloggers, and although these readers are often promoted as a kind of “cure” for information overload, most users eventually discover after the initial excitement wears off, that they start to suffer from RSS Feed information overload.
There’s no single technology solution to this problem, but there are two readers that I’ve found to be particularly helpful, in that they make it easy to set up categories to group your incoming feeds. One is NewzCrawler, a PC-based fee based reader which as a nice Outlook-like interface, and another is a lesser known one called Lektora. Lektora is also useful if you have your own blog, as its companion software is a very handy blog editor program called Qumana.
Let me know if you’ve found a reader that you think helps you out in managing feed overload.
business research
information overload
Lektora
Qumana
NewzCrawler
RSS Feeds
Robert, I use Bloglines and often mark/save stories to read later. Unfortunately, I’ve been busy, so the backlog is big, but now I find that the cream floats to the top and I can quickly see what of that backlog I need to read.
BTW On a day-to-day basis, I do read many posts and skim many, too. (I’m big on skimming…) And I save a few for later.
Bloglines allows for categories, marking an RSS feed as private (great if I’m tracking something for a client), marking posts to read later, and even clipping posts to save permenantly.
I look forward to reading you blog!
Comment by Jill Hurst-Wahl — March 2, 2006 @ 10:05 pm
I wrote and use zaptxt.com. It’s a service that allows you to filter RSS feeds and to get notified via email or SMS when a new RSS post contains the keyword phrase I specified. It’s not exactly an RSS Reader, but more of an RSS manager, weeding out stuff you don’t need. It helps me locate the information I need without needing an RSS Reader. Anyway, FYI.
Comment by eduard — March 2, 2006 @ 10:53 pm
Most helpful feature in NewzCrawler to reduce information overload is a smart folders. You can setup a set of smart folders that will mark interesting news for you, delete spam, notify you about news arrival.
Comment by Alexei — March 4, 2006 @ 6:35 am
I go back and forth myself on how important it really is to have an RSS reader to keep up with incoming news and blog postings–while certainly convenient, even in a perfectly structured and organized reader, there is still a sense of getting too much information.
My preference for learning and keeping up is still to skim favorite sources both offline and on; perform keyword searches on Google, Google News and other search engines and databases; find experts and key bloggers, and ask them my own questions to truly “customize” information that is meaningful for me.
This to me feels more active rather than being a passive reader and recipient of the feeds as they flow into my PC.
Norman Mailer recently complained that the Internet has made knowledge acquisition “too easy”. It’s something I’ve been thinking about. I think that perhaps he was referring to the more passive nature of clicking links and browsing the Web as the extent of our thinking about research. For many more savvy Internet users today, the passive reading of feeds may present similar problems.
Comment by Robert Berkman — March 5, 2006 @ 6:39 pm