Comments on: Are We Entering the Post-Reader Era?

By: shaun mclane

shaun mclane — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 04:19:42 +0000

I’ve just moved FriendFeed to my homepage, and get a ton of info from there. I also have started checking popurls for the hot items. I’ve seen a serious drop in my feed reading, with the exception of tuaw, engadget mobile, and of course, WWD. :-)

By: DC Crowley

DC Crowley — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:00:07 +0000

instapaper is funny. I have been using del.icio.us for something similar for the last 3 years. When I see something I tag it as usual and give it either a ‘to-blog’ tag or a ‘todo’ tag. I use google homepage more than reader now. I use reader when I have time (usually with gears on the bus home). Google homepage is great.Techmeme, rssmeme, rww, techcrunch, hacker news and my really sneaky one -> aide rss. I stuck all my feeds (opml file) in and subscribed to the best of… the community sorts it for me :D It’s fairly good, not perfect.

By: engtech

engtech — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:12:33 +0000

My new approach: Google Reader for my “must read” and then Friend Feed for everything else.

I have a couple of other aggregators for speciality topics, but I find it isn’t necessary to follow as many feeds. Use other people as your feed filter.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:20:41 +0000

More an more I’m using RSS feeds from places like Digg and Techmeme that aggregate important content, this way I don’t have to follow as many feeds because the small amount of RSS feeds that I do follow will give me most of the news and all of what slips through the cracks I pick up with one of the news aggregators. RSS feeds aren’t dead, mostly because it’s still the best way to pull content from many news sources and display it in a way that you can digest quickly.

By: Lawrence Salberg

Lawrence Salberg — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:35:02 +0000

Huh? Is she for real? If it’s truly important, it will come across her feed reader anyway??? Gee, I guess that all depends on what she considers important – and what type of feeds she reads and how many she subscribes to.

Quite honestly, I’m not sure my current 70 feeds would cover another 9/11 – not because it wasn’t important, but because it wasn’t relevant or topical to most of what I read.

Oddly, a lot of what we DO read on our feed readers isn’t “important”. Which is why we read it. It’s interesting (sometimes), or curious, provoking, etc. Hardly would I use the word “important” to describe much of what I read.

Reece makes it sound like just glancing at the front page of USA Today at your local 7-Eleven is sufficient to stay informed of “important” events. Mindless. If that is what she used her feed-reader for, she was missing the whole point all along.

And if she is somehow equating Twitter as being ‘information’ that points out ‘important’ stuff to her, she’s a geeked out chic if there ever was one. There has yet to be a single important anything ever mentioned on all of Twitterdom. What can you say that is important in 140 characters? “Turn on the TV. We’re under attack!”?? That’s about it, I think.

The key to making sure your feed reader is real and useful is to make sure it is loaded with quality original services that don’t overlap. Mix a little pop-info in there if you must, but if you are seeing eleven posts about basically the same news story, you are abusing your reader – so don’t blame the feed reader, blame the user.

By: fyc

fyc — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:39:42 +0000

Over the past two or three months, I’ve slowly managed to go from about 125 feeds in Google Reader to 37 just so that I can cope with all the items (because I don’t have enough time as it is for all those feeds). Besides that, I follow a couple of dozen bloggers on Twitter.

I’ve used Greader for a couple of years now and I’m sticking to it for the very reasons chrisbrogan outlined just above. Since I don’t have to deal with two thousand feed items (as I know some people do), it’s the laziest option for me.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:30:08 +0000

I still keep my feeds under control with netnewswire. It’s still the friendliest way to keep on top of my favorite sites.

I have added Instapaper to my arsenal though. It’s a nice addition rather than a replacement though -http://theweeklyreview.ca/2008/02/18/incorporating-instapaper/

By: chrisbrogan

chrisbrogan — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:55:55 +0000

I use Google Reader, and the reason I do, is because, as a web worker, I need a tool that is fast, robust, allows me to move quickly through information, and then parse that information out for future use.

With the keyboard commands, I can skim, dive deep, mark for later action, share with others, email with folks not using Google Reader, and flush what’s not worth reading.

If you’re just reading to stay current, those other ideas work. But if you’re out there looking for information with which to do business, Google Reader, a few clever Yahoo! Pipes meets Twitter searches, and FriendFeed are musts.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:11:05 +0000

For me, the most useful link in Reece’s post is the link to Instapaper. I’m constantly finding stuff outside of bloglines that I want to read later. Not only does this Instapaper hold onto these for me so I don’t crowd up my bookmarks sidebar, but it also creates a feed of my unread ‘read later’ items… which I’ve added to my bloglines subscriptions.

But Alltop? My eyes glaze over just looking at that thing.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:54:48 +0000

I don’t get Instapaper. Why would you use it if you use Google Reader? I just star items I want to read later.