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Feed Reader Heaven or Email Inbox Hell?
It’s been an opinionated week for us, and it’s not quite over yet. Bear with us, folks.
At Put Things Off, Nick Cernis is suggesting that everyone remove RSS subscription from their blogs. The theory is that feed readers “are attention-seekers, time-hoggers, virtually benefit-free, hard to promote or evangelise, and almost impossible to scale and keep up with as our subscriptions and interests grow.”
I’d like to bring up a possible thought: Could it possibly be that RSS and feed readers aren’t the problem? Feed readers don’t create overwhelming lists of posts to read.
People do.
I like my feed reader. My feed reader is my friend because I like an empty email inbox. Why would I want to fill my inbox up with hundreds of post updates? Why would I want to set up an email system like Nick’s very own Inbox Heaven just to filter incoming blog posts when I can have everything neatly in one place?
I just got my damned email under control, for crying out loud. I have a feed reader for a reason – to keep crap out of my inbox. James would probably flip if he had to add more email to his daily surge.
We like feed readers because we’re smart about how we use them. I go through my feed reader on a regular basis and unsubscribe from blogs I’m not reading anymore or those that have lost my interest. If I haven’t bothered reading a blog in a month, it’s gone.
I know the reason why I’m fed up with my feed reader – and it certainly isn’t the fault of Feedburner, let me tell you. There’s some very boring content out there lately, and paying attention to it is a waste of my life.
I’m not suggesting everyone ditch reading blogs. Not at all. I’m suggesting that instead of blaming feed readers for a plunge in quality of life or a lack of free time, perhaps we should look at the blogs we subscribe to a little more closely and determine their worth before subscribing for updates.
(At this point, I’d like to say that I’m not claiming that all our content is earth-shattering, but there had to be a reason that Men with Pens won second place out of the Top Ten Blogs for Writers. It wasn’t because we’re just pretty faces.)
Don’t Blame The External Factors
Stop blaming equipment and trends of society. Learn to cope with your addictions and overcome your personal issues. Quit blaming outside factors for your problems. If something isn’t working, look to yourself.
Here are two easy tips to help you get started:
- Too many subscriptions in your feed reader? Unsubscribe from some of them.
- Working so hard that you have no time for anything else? Stop doing so damned much.
It’s that easy, people. When you have an addiction, don’t blame the substance. Face yourself in the mirror and overcome your negative needs.
Make. Your. Words. Count.
Sorry if this post pisses some people off, but I call stupidity when I see it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read and think of post ideas that actually benefit our readers.
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I wouldn’t ditch my feed reader, either. In fact, email subscriptions is what drove me to start using RSS in the first place. I found email subscriptions were impossible to scale.
I follow a few dozen blogs for research purposes, and the last thing I want is a constant stream of emails popping in that I have to wade through in Gmail, opening, closing, deleting …
Feed readers also rock for the ability to just scroll down to catch up on a single blog. Not all this clicking and reloading via email. And also for being able to peek in and at a glance se which blogs are updated, rather than scanning down a list of unsorted emails (psst, Gmail, would it KILL YOU to have clickable comment headers?)
Feed readers are great (for me). But that’s just me.
To each his own. :-p
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I read a lot _more_ blogs since I use an RSS feeder, so my overall participation in the blogosphere has multiplied over the last months.
Project “Inbox Zero” is a daily thing for me. I’m a stickler for being organized and so far, so good. With that in mind, I just don’t subscribe to receive too many blogs via email. There are a select few that I do subscribe to via email, but not many. The rest are in my feedreader where “I do” perform monthly maintenance (which includes reorganizing and un-subscribing; no offense to the author it’s just that content should be relevant & consistent. When it ceases to be, there’s no benefit). My feedreader makes that all very easy to manage!
I love my feedreader – email subscriptions drive me nuts. Bad enough that I have to subscribe to emails to follow comment streams… (as I subscribe to comment notifications for this post…
)
Even though I follow, um… *leaves to count her feeds* … 112 feeds, most of them don’t update every day so it doesn’t take nearly as long as it sounds to read all the posts I want to read. I never have a problem with my RSS subscriptions cutting into my productivity, and if I’m too busy, then I’ll set the longer ones or the posts I care about aside until I have the time to read them.
I read Nick’s post and still don’t understand why email subscriptions are supposed to be better… email’s harder for me to ignore, so for me at least, it would make me less productive than my RSS subscriptions do. *shrugs* To each his or her own, I suppose.
Email works for some, RSS works for others. Which is why I have both on my blogs. I think it would be incredibly stupid to take the RSS button off of someone’s blog… that shuts out readers like myself, and if I’m not subscribed to it, I can almost guarantee I’ll never be back.
i think feedreader is the greatest invention ever to hit the blogosphere! i already have three email boxes, the oldest one has been relegated for junk, the gmail, which i check daily, for friends and relevent issues, and another just for social work related stuff. it would just be rediculous with a fourth for blogs. sorry i can’t spell this morning. i do find myself going through the subscriptions every other week or so and deleting stuff. i also have an entire page dedicated to my blogroll that provides snippets of the blogs i read. sometimes going there is faster than the igoogle thing, especially if i am searching for something in particular. the only thing that bothers me about reading blogs through a feedreader is that the author doesn’t know i’ve read their latest post unless i go to comment. i also don’t think feedburner keeps an accurate account of your readers/subscribers…at least i hope they don’t
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Harry, man, you’re on a roll this week.
I’m a happy RSS feed reader user and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Mark Dykemans last blog post..A verb you will never hear me say
I only have a handful of blogs directed to my inbox and the rest in my reader. My life would be out of control if I allowed my inbox to handle blog feeds– no thanks.
As for those pretty faces of yours, I’m waiting. Waiting. Waiting for the day….
Ahh, Karen, what would life be like without glorious anticipation? Nothing to look forward to, no hope to foster… sad, really. So let’s not be sad! Let’s rejoice that together, we kindle this desirable state!
(Did it work?)
As for email versus feed readers, Harry’s right. I would go fucking bzonkers if I received more email, had to set filters and moderate my own inbox, had to remember to go read the folder’s contents… No. Just no.
To each his own, certainly, but there’s a difference between using a method for oneself and forcing everyone else to use it too.
107 subscriptions, 8 of which are blogs that haven’t posted in months, and half of which are completely irrelevant to my life and add nothing to it, to be very honest.
Hm. Time for a cleanup.
I gave Nick’s idea a try, just to see.
I currently have 217 feeds (hmm, thought it was more!) – the ones that are really important to me, I have tagged in Google Reader (and also NetNewsWire, which I was testing out again).
The tagged ones I check all the time. The other ones I scan at regular intervals (maybe once every couple of days).
Gmail for me seems to have more powerful commands (especially keyboard) than Google Reader, so I took a small subset of my feeds and sent them to my Gmail to try it out.
Hey, it seems to work pretty well for me. Like everyone says, if you don’t have discipline with a reader, email won’t help you either.
I also have never unsubscribed to a feed, either. I subscribed to it for a reason, an interesting post, perhaps – and even if that writer is boring today, perhaps tomorrow she might write something brilliant.
It just isn’t worth my time to comb through my feeds and unsubscribe to things. I find it a more effective use of my time to pick out the best and tag them for attention, rather than worry about what is now boring and get rid of it. They’re just electrons, after all!
There’s my opinionated statement for the day…
Brett Legrees last blog post..still doing crazy things…
@ Brett – I’m curious – how long did it take to set up and do you have to maintain the system in any way? You mention tagging – c’est quoi?
I go with a feed reader all the way. If Nick thinks my Feed Reader is overcrowded, then he would really be depressed by my email. I already get several newsletters a week that I don’t read. While I probably am a little oversubscribed to feds, I so delete one when it becomes clear that I’ve lost interest or just can’t keep up, but for the most part I am happy to glance at a headline and see what interests me.
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Harry,
Nope. I understand what you are saying about the tool vs. the abuse of the tool, but I still don’t agree with you.
RSS is like using a credit card instead of cash: it’s way easier to overindulge when the evidence is not right in your face.
I have other reasons for sticking with email subs, but keeping things under control is a prime one. Long before Nick wrote his post, I voiced it all over town: making them blog posts in with everything else the cat drags in, makes me be choosy. Simple as that.
To quote Nick: “Email has a built-in scaling system; you know very quickly if you’re receiving more mail than you can productively handle.” I couldn’t have said it better, though goodness knows I try. I don’t partition it off, I let it come right in and clog things up. They get read, they get filed or deleted, and they get ruthlessly unsubscribed when I haven’t felt the love lately.
It works like a charm, because I have to be able to find my real email, even on my personal email inbox. Less than thirty subs, usually way less.
Folks who “read” 200 blogs or more? You can come and punch me if you like, but you aren’t “reading” every one. Worse yet, you aren’t engaging. I don’t say that’s worse because Harry and James rarely comment on my blog, he he, I say it’s worse because of the deeper learning that you avoid when you whiz through, feeling it’s all the boring same, and hoping a little will stick to the walls of your imagination and it flies by. Let less whiz by, and the depth of what’s there will become more obvious, you’ll be less bored, and *you*—not the author—will gain a lot more.
Even sponges can’t hold an infinite amount. After a while things just dribble away.
I love coming here and mixing metaphors.
Regards,
Kelly
Kellys last blog post..Inspiration Points: The Not-So-Secret Ticket to Your Fortunes
@James,
It didn’t take too long in Google Reader – you go to Manage Subscriptions, and each feed can be put into a Folder – you can click on the pull down box that says Change Folder and at the very bottom of the list there’s one that says “New Folder”.
Then you can put important feeds in a New Folder of your choice (call it Important, perhaps). I read those daily, and skim the rest when I feel like it (e.g. when I’m having a beer).
With the email thing, I picked a few feeds and subscribed by email to test it. Then, I set up filters in Gmail (under Settings) to apply a Label to the feeds – I set the feeds to Skip the Inbox as well, so my Inbox doesn’t get filled up with Feeds.
It seems to work pretty well.
Brett Legrees last blog post..still doing crazy things…
RSS feeds are great., too, if you need to be able to quickly access a large pool of updates and news that you may not need on an ongoing basis. I have one particular category in my feeds that I flush much more often than I read. However, when I need to get a feel for what the huge number of blogs in that area are chattering about on a particular day, I can literally scroll through and get the big picture quickly, rather than hunting and pecking down a list of emails.
Kelly, I agree — nobody can “read” that many feeds. But RSS is a cool way to quickly scan for eye-popping topics and tidbits. I keep feeds for sites I may want to actually ruminate over separately from their mass-mailed, PR-driven compadres. Works for me!
@ Brett – Yeah, the reader setup I know and use. Handy, that. I suppose you’re right in that the same type of system can be done with email as well, filtering to various folders, but does that truly cut down on reading and make life more efficient, as Nick implies, or does it just accomplish the same thing with another type of tool?
I use a special Gmail-account for my feeds and mailing lists. That works a lot better for me than the feed reader did. Using Gmail labels it is easy to filter posts and then read whichever label I find most important that time.
I like my feed reader, especially since I weened it down to 10 feeds max. Now I’m more careful about the blogs I add, and when I do want to add one something else has to go. Really makes me think about the value a feed is giving me. I keep bookmarks of other blogs that don’t make the list for perusal when I feel like it.
But enough about feeds. The real question is, what’s making the Men so irritable this week. I mean, have they given up eating, or beer, or something else to get in shape for the photos, or what…?
I’ve done an experiment between RSS and email feeds for myself. The RSS wins for reasons brilliantly articulated above.
I’m not particularly happy about that, though, because Pete and I have decided we would do a newsletter – because we know via market research (at the bar with friends, relatives and our other sycophants – we all so love to drink) a lot of our audience doesn’t yet use RSS (or know what it is). So, a newsletter about how to set up RSS for yourself – and other stuff, of course – probably means everyone would eventually opt out. But still. . . I have my reasons for a newsletter. Which aren’t all evolved and logical, either.
Perhaps Nick just puts off cleaning up his RSS?
Seriously, it’s like letting magazines and such pile up in your house.
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I couldn’t live without a reader now. Much better for skimming relevant posts than e-mail.
The key to avoiding feed indigestion ( outside of news feeds) is be ruthless in subscribing only to posts/blogs that really deliver value and insight , rather than those that do pithy remarks, talk shops or re-gurgitate other stuff already in the blogsphere.
Then reading them isn’t onerous.
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I have 166 feeds, though not all of those are blogs. I also use Bloglines to subscribe to some podcasts (my iPod won’t hold everything I want to listen to), webcomics, and Twitter searches (mainly “vanity” searches). Without Bloglines it would be a lot harder to keep track of all of that. Also a few of those feeds are group blogs that post 5-7 times a day and this makes it easier to skim and stay on top of things.
I’ve unsubscribed to a blog or two but it’s a rare thing. Also, for some reason I can’t quite identify, there are blogs and webcomics that I read that I am not subscribed to. So actually that number would probably be nearer to 200.
Also I love a little snark so posts like this are just fine by me.
Also also just an fyi I want to thank you guys again for encouraging me to make the changes I have to my blog. I’ve trimmed the focus to a more spiritual direction (though I still make the occasional life/family post) and moved my novel stuff off to it’s on WP blog. Between you guys and a friend of mine David (http://davidmullen.wordpress.com/), a PR genius, my subscription rates/hits are consistently going up 10-15% a week.
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@ Scott – Oh, hot damn! Check out the color scheme you have going on – well done, bro, and worlds better than what you used to have. That’s nice indeed, very nice!
(And good to hear it’s brought you good results, too!)
@ Gary – Too much coffee? Not enough morning wheaties? A momentary lapse of feeling like kicking the can around a bit?
Wow, Harry, you’ve got some cranky pants planets lined up this week *chuckle*
I do most of my reading from work ON MY BREAKS, PEOPLE (uh-huh) and the Factory strictly forbids feeds. So, I simply have everything bookmarked and I systematically go through my list. I only have 52 blogs I read. I can’t imagine the point of having hundreds. I know I’d never do any of them justice.
I have also gotten brutal about cleaning up my list. I sort of have a 1 In 1Out system. If I had a new blog, I check to see if there is one I can drop.
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I do mine differently. I sort by priority (or quality of the blog, if you will.) The blogs I *really* like, I have in a special folder under Bookmarks. Firefox allows you to “open in all tabs” so I get all my fav websites up every morning with three clicks. (I’m gonna open them anyways to comment.)
I also have a select few feeds that I subscribe to by email, just so I don’t miss a post.
Thirdly, I have about 25 feeds in my Mac Mail that I collect daily, read once a week and decide to archive or throw out.
I like Brett’s idea about the gmail thing. I might try that someday soon.
@Scott I LOVE it!
@Gary, Too much email!!!!
@ James, Harry I am NEVER emailing you again, I swear.
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Word, Harry. RSS reader is a resource. Nurture it, add and subtract when necessary, and it is an exceedingly valuable toolbox.
Of my 112 feeds, there were only 28 new posts today, and I only found 15 interesting enough to click through. Took me 20 minutes to read them all, including comments.
So no, I wouldn’t consider my feedreader to be a productivity drain… for me.
“RSS is like using a credit card instead of cash: it’s way easier to overindulge when the evidence is not right in your face.” Or maybe I’m just a freak. *shrugs* I find that I am more likely to spend money when I’m using cash than when I’m using a credit card.
As for feeds vs. email… I open my feedreader once first thing in the morning, read what interests me, then close it the rest of the day. On the other hand, I use Google notifier to let me know when I have email, so if I subscribed to email feeds, they would be in my face, distracting me and demanding my attention all day.
Again, different things work for different people. Hence the advantage (as a blog owner) of offering both.
Yes…RSS feeds can start to be sort of like spam….very annoying. But the thing, is to get your email under control, you you have to make sure you aren’t subscribing to every blog in the universe. A good idea would be to set up a seperate email account specifically for subscriptions.
@James,
It could depend. One thing, I can access my Gmail from my cell phone while on the go but not Google Reader (it’s the muckety muck plan my company has). So there’s a win for me right now.
I suspect part of the issue is that people use RSS feeders in different ways, for different purposes.
Some, like me, subscribe to blogs where they want to read 90% of the posts. It’s rare that I skip past a post in my reader, and I deliberately weed out feeds that I’m losing interest in. (Don’t worry, Men with Pens is in no danger.
)
Other folks, though — at least, from what I’ve seen them saying on their blogs — treat their feed reader in the way I treat the newspaper. They get loads of stuff that they MIGHT be interested in, and they skim through it, stopping if something catches their attention. Perhaps they subscribe to “vanity” feeds, or big blogs where only a small percentage of the posts actually engage them (but they stay subscribed because the quality of those few posts makes it worth it).
I don’t think either way of using a feed reader is the “correct” one — they’re just different methods of using the same tool.
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Allison,
Going slightly off-topic: The entire credit card industry thrives on the fact that you stand alone in spending less with a card than you do with cash.
Most folks feel the pinch way less, and overspend—something like 30% more—with a card.
Until later,
Kelly
Kellys last blog post..Inspiration Points: The Not-So-Secret Ticket to Your Fortunes
Kelly – Yep, I’m the kind of person credit card companies hate… never spend more than I can pay off, never paid a cent in interest. Only reason I use the credit card is that I figure if I’m going to spend money, might as well get reward dollars or points out of it.
*shrugs* It’s possible that I’m a freak of nature. The idea of not having enough money to pay off the entire balance at billing time causes panic for me – I’ve only spent more than I had once, because my boyfriend had to do some car maintenance and didn’t have a high enough credit limit to pay for the maintenance. I was a little panicked until he wrote me a check to pay for it.
(Oops, sorry Harry. We got just a wee bit off topic.
)
@ Allison/Kelly – I’ll be living proof. Credit card companies call me MISTER Chartrand and it ain’t because they’ve recognized my celebrity status yet.
Then again, I’ve also learned to buy and pay off in the same month, so I’m ahead of their game. For now. It’s a tenuous grip.
For me, email alerts simply don’t cut it, and here’s why.
Email is for business, which usually runs hard and fast. I know when I get an email that something most likely requires action, revision, attention of some sort.
If I have emails dinging at me and alerting me all throughout the day every time someone writes a blog post, the first thing that happens is that I get distracted. The second thing that happens is that I have to get back into the zone I was in before I got distracted. No good.
“So, why not just shut down your email until you’re ready for the distraction?” Because that’s horrible business. I know Ferriss at the 4-Hour work week backs this idea, but why would any good business person ignore clients and potential clients for extended periods of the day?
I also have a policy of responding to clients/colleagues instantaneously so shutting down my email isn’t really an option.
With an RSS reader, I check feeds when I want to check feeds. Not when feeds think they need to be checked.
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“Don’t blame the external factors.” Yes, exactly! Why is it that people hate to take responsibility for their own decisions? How can the feed readers be guilty of eating your time? I read the original post, but the argument still makes no sense to me. Yours does.
–Debs last blog post..Now, Better Customer Service!
I love my RSS feeds! But I DO try to be very vigilant about removing subscriptions when I haven’t read them for a while.
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HA!
I read Nick Cernis’ article about deleting RSS feeds and instead having visitors subscribe via email. While he wrote convincingly, you point out one very important point: it’s not the feed readers (or email subscriptions either) that are the culprit. It’s the person doing the subscribing.
It puts responsibility squarely on the shoulder of the person who created the overwhemingly lost list of blogs in the reader (or email subscriptions).
I just went through my RSS feed and pared it down some more. Every day I delete one or two feeds that have lost my interest. It’s becoming more and more manageable.
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Harry – I love the little cartoon dude with the catapult. Like you – I couldn’t bear the thought of a heap of email subscriptions. I’ve been streamlining my feedreader lately because I couldn’t see the good stuff among the crap.
I don’t expect everyone to write something amazingly interesting all the time. But some folk will post once a month and still manage to come up with the most boring crap I’ve read. Why should I waste my time reading these people? I spend a whole heap of time writing, while they probably spend ten minutes a month.
Glad to have inspired some debate, Harry!
While I understand the desire to separate feed reading from email and recognise the right to make that choice, I think that subscribing by email differs in two important ways that many people overlook: influence and experience.
I’ll show you what I mean by replying to just two of the points in this post. You say:
You make a dangerous assumption here: that the tools people use have zero influence on the habits they form or the actions they take. I’d suggest very strongly that you’re missing one half of the equation there. The influence that tools exert over people is a powerful one and shouldn’t be ignored.
You argument falls on dangerously similar lines to the NRA’s motto: that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This line of reasoning is fatally flawed because, of course, it’s the tool — the gun, in this case — which ultimately shapes the outcome and the action of the individual, and causes them to take action based on its intended use — to kill. In a similar way, a feed reader — a tool designed to make subscribing to a massive stream of new content easy — leads its users to do exactly that by design; to take on more than they would have done if they used another tool. In the same way, you could successfully argue that a gun is more likely to encourage someone to kill than a stick would: just look at the number of deaths in the national register caused by each one, then factor-in the comparative ease of acquiring a stick!
And, while it’s certainly possible to resist both ultimate ends — killing with a gun or becoming overwhelmed with a feed reader — never picking up either in the first place removes the likelihood of those events from occurring, especially when the alternatives — sticks or email in this case — make the undesirable actions harder to accomplish. It’s simple, really: changing the tool changes the outcome. You’ve assumed that it’s simply down to people. To me, it’s pretty clear that it’s not.
So that’s the first point: that people are only one half of the equation, and that the tools they use are the other.
Secondly, you say:
I’d suggest that it’s not about blame or trends. It’s about experience. And, again, there’s a world of difference in the experience that one piece of equipment — or tool — has over another.
I might be able to skim through the 30 second previews of 250 songs in the iTunes Music Store to make a snap purchase decision in the same time it would take for me to listen to just one 12″ record in a local music shop while I chat to the owner about what he knows about the band, but the experience is a completely different one. (And, if you’ve never listened to Crosstown Traffic on vinyl, you’re missing an experience there too!)
I could download 30 books onto an Amazon Kindle in the same time it would take for me to walk the 200 yards to my local independent bookstore and ask Jerry what one title he recommends for me this week, but the experience , interaction, and immersion is completely different. I’d also argue that the experience of listening to a track on a record player and reading a paper book is much better than their electronic counterparts (which is why I don’t own a Kindle). So it’s not about blaming Apple for making it so easy to buy music, or writing angry letters to Amazon for giving us too much choice at the touch of a button. Instead, it’s about the experience in each case.
So here’s where it comes down to opinion: for me, and for those who choose to read by email and abandon feed readers, the experience of reading by email is a better one in spite of what some would deem shortcomings, in the same way that many will always prefer paper books to the growing alternatives in spite of the paper cuts.
So that’s the second point: that it’s not just about one tool vs the other in pure quantitative terms, but about the qualitative differences: the experience design.
And, in a world where the choices available for consuming an ever-expanding stream of information are themselves growing exponentially, I’d argue that we’re all our own experience designers, and that the tools we use to create our daily interactions and the choices we make between them are increasingly important.
So, while I respect your right to disagree and commend you for telling people to look to themselves to fight their addictions, I think that perhaps you’ve formed your own opinion too early this time. I would have been more comfortable with a counter-argument presented as “I read so-and-so’s post, tried both options, and recommend you do it this way”, which is what I always try to aim for. Perhaps the fact that I’d tried both and built an opinion based on my experience got lost in my silly diagrams this time.
Of course, while it’s both the people and the tools that cause the end result — in this case, my post and your response — it’s far easier to blame the tools instead of the people.
Broadcasting our opinions is just so easy these days.
Nick,
You totally, completely rock.
@ Nick – Now, see, all that you wrote up there heavily convinces me that you’re right. Having that in your original post about switching to email over feeds would have gone a long, long way in making me more tempted to agree with you. I feel that the lack of personal accountability was integral to having a more convincing argument, and it would’ve been good to have read that in your post.
I will say that both Harry and I have done a good long run using email versus RSS. In fact, Harry strongly opposed my insistence that he change to a feed reader (and I think we have a couple of posts around the blog on that situation). So it’s not that we haven’t tried both and experimented and formed opinions based on that – we have.
I think that the post you wrote also didn’t address that personal accountability of addiction to feeds enough as well. Had that been touched on – that people should read *less* versus switching their methods – I might have also been more agreeable to the post’s message.
Of course, as many have mentioned, it’s all a matter of personal preference, too. Some like a Glock, some like a shotgun.
@Kelly Thanks! I love the credit card analogy. I cut up my cards a year ago and started using debit cards and cash instead. Oddly enough, I haven’t dipped into debt since.
@James I think personal accountability plays a part, but I’m not certain what the benefit of pointing fingers at the individual is. My approach — to encourage people to change their tools to change themselves — might be a softer option, but I think it’s also far more helpful.
It’s incredibly easy to tell a fat man to eat less, but it’s not such a constructive piece of advice if you’re him.
Changing the tools and the environmental factors works so well because it removes the option to fall back into bad habits, and even prevents them from shaping in the first place. Remove the matches from your kids’ bedsides and you reduce the likelihood of waking up to a smoke alarm clock. Remove the supersize option as McDonald’s have done — or remove the feedreader — and make it that much harder to be overfed.
The tools and the environment really do have a massive impact on the individual, the habits they form, and the lifestyle they lead. When I write, I try to do so in a light-hearted way that steers people on a harder-hitting path to self-discovery. By encouraging people to go without their feed readers for one month by gently poking fun at how easy they make it to go astray, I hoped that readers would discover the link between software and habit-forming for themselves. I’ve had a lot of email saying that it’s working well for many, although most commenters seem to have rubbished the idea without trying it, which, of course, only proves this:
Sometimes, the shotgun approach has its merits!
I absolutely agree with this statement:
“Stop blaming equipment and trends of society. Learn to cope with your addictions and overcome your personal issues. Quit blaming outside factors for your problems. If something isn’t working, look to yourself.”
Tinkering around with things can put us in a better position to succeed, but ultimately, it’s our own willpower and committment that effects real change.
Having said that, I completely agree with Nick and ditched my feed reader back in August to use email subscriptions–it’s worked just fine for me. Currently, though, I’m back to using bookmarks for keeping up with my (extremely short) list of favorite blogs–and only checking those bookmarks once or twice a week.
Getting off of the information overload grid is one of the best things any of us can do, regardless of the means employed.
I don’t need to read 200 blogs a day. I’d rather be outside enjoying the weather, doing things.
Jesse Hiness last blog post..The 2 “S’s†of Effective Business Writing
I think that feed readers are great. What has been lacking in many readers is a way to easily re-publish a feed that you are reading to your blog so that you can quickly create content around the feed item that you have read.
I m also a feed junky, and because I wanted to have some features not available in most feed readers; I have designeda feed reader that matches and best google reader in many areas. To make sure that the feed reader can continue to evolve with the best features in the near future we will be releasing it with an Open Source license.
williams last blog post..adelph.us Feed Reader/Google Can’t have all the fun
@William: You’re going to have to be more specific with what you mean by re-publishing. Scrapers and new bloggers who take posts and republish them on their blogs is a topic that gets me fired up real fast, so the thought of making it easier for people to do that sort of thing looks like very dangerous ground to me.