Paul asked me a while back which feeds I would keep if I could only have five. Or something like that, the exercise was basically, pick five and only five.
If you’re like me, you cull your feeds every so often. Every three to six months, I get overwhelmed with unread items and cut out stuff I don’t read. Subscribing to feeds is a bit like buying clothes, at least for me. I hate shopping, with special distaste for trying on clothing.
So, I’ll buy more than I expect to use and return stuff I don’t like or that doesn’t fit. Feeds are the same way. I end up subscribing to more feeds than I end up reading.
It’s a cycle. Cull-subscribe-cull again.
Without further ado, here are my five and why:
- Slashdot: I’ve been reading /. forever, long before syndication. It’s my standard for geeky news. Who cares about voting anyway? Plus, I have a college buddy who’s been teasing me about reading /. for years. So, it’s also a battle of wills thing.
- Dilbert: Again, I’ve been reading it forever in other forms. Oh, and it’s the gold standard for snarky office humor and “that’s so true” moments.
- OraNA: Before adding this one, I wondered would still subscribe if I weren’t at Oracle anymore. The answer is yes because this is how I keep up with all the characters I’ve met in Oracle-land. Suprised that I wouldn’t keep it for Oracle-related blogs and information?
- Silicon Florist: I need my local tech fix, and as with OraNA, I’d still subscribe if I moved away from Portland (egad, no). Rick’s a friend of mine, and I enjoy reading about people and companies I know IRL.
- Techmeme: By this point, I’m wondering why I even need five. Techmeme overlaps /. content a bit, but its aggregation makes it useful to me. By subscribing to Techmeme, I get: all of TechCrunch (literally every post) all of Scoble, most of Read Write Web, Web Worker Daily, Giga OM, Lifehacker, Engadget, and Gizmodo a lot of Mashable and Valleywag, some New York Times and a slew of bloggers I can’t remember.
They’re not really in order, but I could live without Techmeme.
Looking at them, I’ve noticed that aggregation is key. Even with all this aggregation, it’s still challenging to keep track of the conversation. For example, my post on workcations had 0 likes and 0 comments in FriendFeed, at least as an item in my feed. The Ontario Emperor kindly pointed me to a discussion going on in his feed about the post. I’m sure this is because the OE is super active on FF, and I rarely touch it these days.
Wacky stuff. Makes you wonder if the conversation even matters anymore, another discussion I had with Paul. I’m waiting to hear his thoughts in blog form.
Anyway, this exercise is similar to reading a person’s Google Reader shared items; it opens a window into a person’s interests.
For example, Paul shares gadgety stuff, like green cars, cameras, robots, etc. Rich shares super geeky hacker stuff, surprise, with a dash of geeky lifestyle and business every once in a while. If you want to know how to see the shared items of friends in Reader, review this post.
So, what are your five? Let us know in comments.
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