Information Overload

I’ve finally decided how to manage all the content I’d like to consume – I think. :)

Until yesterday, I was tracking 341 feeds in my bloglines account. I’ve had a base set of about 310 for quite a while and I add new feeds all the time to a test folder. I was having difficulty feeling in control of all that info for a couple of reasons.

One – an immense volume of information. Many of the feeds I read generate many posts. I cannot wade through all the headlines every day and therefore I become swamped with even more info on the next day. I would frequently fire up bloglines and find the number of entries well into the thousands.

Two – am I really in control? I was beginning to feel like I was being pushed around by the UI at bloglines. I like the look and feel generally, but it can be a little sluggish, especially when I open a folder with 1000+ entries. I wouldn’t call it slow, but it could be a little slicker.

Looking for a solution

More than six month ago I began to look for a solution to my information overload problem. I played with Thunderbird and live bookmarks in FireFox; but I decided to stick with a web-based solution of some kind. I love the fact that I can reach my feeds from anywhere I can find a browser. Obviously bloglines was in the running and I decided to try Rojo a lot too. The post-centric flow was a nice feature for me and the website is sleeker but it wasn’t always very fast. In the end, I was just afraid to switch and too lazy to try and work both for too long.

Along comes Google’s reader

Very similar to Rojo with the added benefit of *nix style keystrokes. This was a big plus for me. It was one of the things I liked best about Gmail when I first used it. It used keyboard commands that are very similar to mutt, vim and some of my other favorite apps. Two very annoying features forced me to give up right away however. I have read that there are reasons for some of the problems with Google Reader.

Bloglines decides to use hotkeys

Some think bloglines jumped to this conclusion based on Google’s entry into this space. Good move on bloglines part. I am certainly not the only user who prefers to control my applications with the keyboard. Regardless of the reason, this made me feel much better about my decision to use bloglines.

Wait a minute.

I still have not solved my problem with overload. With all the excitement (at least one user is not as enthusiastic as I) over bloglines announcement of hotkeys, I’ve forgotten to deal with the real problem. While it’s on my mind, I decide to just settle this issue once and for all. Then it dawns on me. Use one for news and one for blogs and the like.

You see, I’ve actually been looking for a way to get my eyes on even more news information. As part of this goal, I had considered using another tool for this. So this all seems to have worked out for the better. Bloglines uses folders and a folder and feed centric interface which, I think, works best for blog reading. Rojo uses tags and has a post centric interface, which makes sense, to me, for news. This also eliminates a huge problem I faced with my old setup. If I happen to fall behind on the news, I can catch-up. I was always very reluctant to use mark all read with bloglines because I didn’t want to miss anything from the blogs. Usually, if you miss news, you’ve missed it. No need to read old news, right?

I exported my subscriptions from bloglines, edited the OPML to include only news sites, and imported them to my Rojo account. Then I unsubcribed from those feeds in bloglines and deleted the folder. Now I can manage to monitor even more feeds and feel better about the whole thing.