In the beginning of last week I found a really nice read on the RWW blog: 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock, two points of the Richard MacManus‘s article aroused my interest and I would like to extend them further with a few examples.
1. Filter RSS Streams
Probably we are all constantly facing one of the biggest handicaps about the RSS stream readers – the unread numbers (1000+).
We do subscribe to a lot of websites and find ourselves overloaded with content. The digits in bold keep bugging our mind and we feel like we are always missing something important. While in fact, when subscribing to a RSS emission, by default we do not intend to read everything.
Happily, things evolved and now by applying certain topic(s) to a bunch of sources we can filter their content and get only the stuff we really care about – take for example the Facebook and Twitter news filter that scans 17 carefully preselected top tech blogs for articles about Twitter and Facebook. In the last 24 hours all the 17 blogs published a total of 207 posts with just 29 posts about Facebook and Twitter. I have been spared 178 irrelevant post that would have otherwise turned into 178 unreads.
Filters can be of great help especially when facing one and only massive RSS emission from a certain source and we need a fast and reliable tool to filter it for the content that we are actually into. Things with filters and RSS are getting even better with the vast implementation of the PubSubHubBub protocol, which delivers you the articles in real-time.
2. Categorize News
Categorizing and putting our news feeds in bundles is great, but what use they have if you can not share them with friends? Now you can!
Take a look at the favit.com’s Infographs bundle including 24 awesome feeds related to infographics and data visualization, I have spent half a day researching and curating it, and I will be more than happy to share it my friends so they do not spend the same time in research, but in actually reading it and getting inspiration.
To summarize, I can now say that the “sharing is caring” principle so vastly implemented when sharing single articles have now, thanks to the favit.com developers stretched further to a field that we have erroneously considered private and personal as our Inbox, neglecting the fact that feeds are public and by default shared with everyone from the site that emits them – so go ahead and whenever you find a new interesting source share it with your friends – they will appreciate it!
