"Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you're constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task."
Okay, I call shens on this whole article.
Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.
The problem they're talking about is checking your RSS feed obsessively - which has exactly the same issues as checking your email obsessively, or your texts, or your Facebook wall, or whatever the heck else that you should stop interrupting yourself with constantly.
"Keeping up" does not have to mean being OCD at the expense of getting work done.
The entire article was invalidated (in my mind) by the simple fact that you can choose when you want to open your RSS reader. You don't have to be pinged every 20 seconds. Don't punish everyone just because you can't control yourself.
RSS is immensely useful for staying up-to-date with postings from a broad collection of websites, and without missing a lot of good content, and it's pretty much universally supported. It annoys me very much that there are so many "hip techies" encouraging killing RSS when it is clearly superior to Twitter, or manually browsing all of the different websites, at syndicating content.
Exactly. I use to sit back on launch Reeder on my iPad AFTER my working day is done. It may take some time to go through all those items and skipping duplicate stories can be anoying but it's always nice to end the day with good content that keeps you updated. There's really no need to consider rss as interfering notifications.
I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds. If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes articles that I never read, I remove them.
Also, I segregated high volume feeds (such as Flickr picture feeds and Gizmodo/NYTimes/BBC etc.) into a separate account. I have two accounts, one (low volume) where I try to take a closer more thorough look at everything, and another (high volume) where I simply do a quick scan then mark all as read.
The 'trends' tab in Google Reader is useful to check on that: it gives you both how many items a feed published and how many you clicked on for the last 30 days. This can be useful to confirm the ratios.
Most of my feeds publish only two or three times a week, some even less, but with high signal to noise ratio; that's where RSS really shines, since checking them manually would kill a huge amount of time.
Exactly... but, i can imagine how someone who is obsessed with keeping his rss feed reads all read will have a problem.(much like email). I personally have found it useful to have a limit of not more than 100 posts a month.If i do, i unsubscribe on some feeds that have become irrelevant to me.
For me it was the following two comments. It just showed me this was the type of person who is obsessed with following the latest news and keeping up with all their feeds. It's an edge use-case, and not one I subscribe to (pun intended).
I combined that with my usual e-mail communications and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day.
Twitter is basically an RSS feed, and many people even more obsessively than coffee.
Others may say that they can avoid the all-day-long RSS time suck by only opening their clients once per day, but I argue that it still piles up redundant content that you now have to waste time going through all at once.
Of course, Twitter never has redundant content or an echo-chamber effect.
Both Twitter and RSS have the advantage of letting you decide on your sources, so you have some options for lowering redundancy that don't occur in (more) centralized aggregation like HN or Reddit.
I only got into Twitter relatively recently and find it a better option than RSS, overall. Blogs are weighted down by the expectation of being their own content; tweets are mostly about linking or short updates, and following someone with good links can be a really great experience.
That's what I was thinking, it sounds like she just replaced RSS with Twitter. She's obviously constantly checking Twitter. Instead of reading twitter all day every day I'd rather just browse my RSS feed in the morning and in the evening. I don't feel like I miss anything either.
Jacqui's job is what it is though. Not everyone has the same obligations that she does.
Okay, I call shens on this whole article.
Using RSS means that I speed-read over a few hundred article headers during half an hour over coffee and pop open around a dozen articles to read in full.
The problem they're talking about is checking your RSS feed obsessively - which has exactly the same issues as checking your email obsessively, or your texts, or your Facebook wall, or whatever the heck else that you should stop interrupting yourself with constantly.
"Keeping up" does not have to mean being OCD at the expense of getting work done.