5 Tips to Organization in Google Reader or How to Avoid Information Overload
Nov 26, 2008 Blogs, RSS, Social Media
Information overload is easy when you start subscribing to feeds in a feed reader. It seems everything is possible to subscribe to: news, searches, alerts, blogs, content on websites…And, why not! It allows the user to get the content without the hassle of visiting multiple sites. It is supposed to save you time. But when it is so easy to subscribe, you often subscribe to too much!
In July 2007, I wrote a post on RSS for beginners where I discussed the benefits of subscribing to feeds such as blogs or content on news sites, and some of the tools you can use to organize them. [If you want some helpful hints on what you can use RSS for - check out Parker's post on the Blogcampaigning blog.]
Now, one year and 200 subscriptions later, I have found myself for the 25th time having thousands of unread articles, reluctantly pressing the “Mark all as Read” button. So I decided to do a reorganization of my feed reader. Here are my tips to organizing your feed reader:
1. Delete blogs you aren’t reading
Over time you will subscribe to a lot of feeds, some you will read regularly and others you will find you skip more often than not, and indeed some you won’t read at all! To get rid of many subscriptions go into the Manage Subscriptions and click the trash can next to the ones you are deleting. Or, one at a time – just click “Feed Settings” and unsubscribe.
2. Create a “Must Read” folder
Which blogs do you regularly read? Check out “Trends” in Google Reader, it will show you the percentage of read items over the last 30 days for the feeds you have been reading. Pick your top 20 and move them into the “Must Read” folder
3. Use Starred Items and Tags
Save yourself time and effort trying to find articles later on. I use “Stars” and tags to save posts I might want to refer to later on. I categorize using tags to indicate what the post is about (Twitter, WOM, Facebook, consumer marketing, etc). I also use tags to show what I want to do with the post, for example if I want to print it out I tag it “print”, or if I want to use it for a future blog post I tag it “blog” and star it so I can easily find it later on.
4. Create feeds for frequently updated sites or infrequently read sites using AideRSS.
If you have hundreds of blogs that you read, as I do, you need a way to sort through to find the most valuable posts. This is where AideRSS comes in handy. Some blogs have 30-40 posts a day which can be hard to get through to find the gems. Plug the feed URL into AideRSS and it will show you the Best Posts, Great Posts and Good Posts (based on PostRank and engagement). You can then decide which posts you want to read – the best, the great, or the good ones. You can also choose to subscribe to this feed that you have created – so that you will ONLY get the “Great” posts in your feed reader. You can do this for multiple feeds. For example, I put all the blogs I subscribe to, that don’t fall in my “Must Reads”, into AideRSS. I subscribe to that feed – so I decrease the number of feeds by about 30%. AideRSS has some helpful videos on the site that explain the process.
5. Read and enjoy!
Start with your “Must Reads”, and if the other feeds get to be too much – you can press the “Mark all as Read”.
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Tags: blogging, google, google reader, guide, information, RSS
November 26th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I’m glad my RSS tips were helpful to someone!
Your first point that you should get rid of blogs you aren’t reading is a good one – I do a “spring cleaning” about once a month, and get rid of the stuff that isn’t relevant anymore.
That’s the beauty of social media: it is all opt-in. As soon as you don’t like what someone is writing/saying online, it is easy to stop listening.