Flow of information

by Jay Cross on August 20, 2008


Unless you enjoy being inundated, you’ve got to pull what you want from the web rather than take everything the web pushes at you. That’s what RSS is for: it enables you to subscribe to content that interests you.


Google Reader is excellent for managing your subscriptions with RSS. Google Reader makes it easy to subscribe to a site, to see what’s new, and to read previously unread items. Sometimes that works for me; other times I might prefer picking through a list of titles for what I want or having articles flow by one-by-one.

The Flow page on my blog is my frequent jumping-off point for keeping up on the web.

Do you have a non-vanilla approach to reading your feeds? Any suggestions?

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Dennis Coxe August 21, 2008 at 3:45 am

I scan the titles as well, for instance, I saw the title for this entry and it immediately caught my attention because I constantly am battling information overload. I love gaining new insights. So I was curious to see what you had to say about the matter.

Being an information glutton I am constantly battling information overdose and RSS feeds are the hypodermic needle that deliver my fix. I follow a link from one of my main reads to a new blog and I love the post that I read there. So I subscribe to its RSS feed. After about three months I have over a 100 feeds and there is no way I can even review all of the titles.

As a result, I must occasionally go through my list of feeds and purge those that I very rarely get to look at. It’s like cleaning out the attic and having to decide to get rid of items that have a smidgeon of sentimental value but you can’t justify keeping ithem because you need the space.

jadekaz August 22, 2008 at 9:53 am

I use an iGoogle page – the blogs I rely on dearly I make their own pod. All others sit in google reader pod. Next to those are twitter, 2 gmail boxes, and my delicous links. Then there’s my Google Notebook so I can write down important stuff that comes to me. Finally, is the to-do-list pod – for action items. And that’s just one tab in my iGoogle. That’s how I flow :)

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