Over recent months I’ve found I’m reading RSS feeds less and less. The main difficulty is that links are now so often shared on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon etc – that RSS can easily be forgotten sometimes. It’s actually quite common that I’ll login to see 1000+ items to read so just end up marking all as read and pretending they were never there, rather than being overloaded with information.
Plus there are so many excellent blogs out there now, meaning that it’s impossible to keep up-to-date on every post from the likes of SEL, SEW, SEJ, SER, SEOmoz, Econsultancy etc. What I need is a system that picks out the best posts which I’m interested in and sends them to me instead!
This is where Google Buzz comes in, and I’ve got to admit, I haven’t got Google Buzz yet, I signed up, integrated Twitter and then left it there – like most people. But this morning I tried cleaning up my RSS subscriptions – to help avoid the 1000+ situation and noticed a list of high-quality blog posts recommended from the people I follow on Google Buzz:
At first my reaction was “great, even more feeds I should be reading”! But then I realised perhaps I could use this to my advantage, the people I follow on both Twitter and Google Buzz are very selective – so rather than getting too much information thrown at me from all angles, I’d actually have more trust that we share similar interests and that I’ll like the content they share on Google Reader.
So what I’ve done is unsubscribe from all blogs (expect SEOptimise of course – how do you think we have so many readers?!) and for the next week or two I’m going to try and solely rely on this to filter out the best news from around the blogosphere and keep me up-to-date with all things search.
Is anyone else doing this? If all else fails I’ve got a backup of my old subscriptions so I can always go back to that, but surely it’s worth a try.
www.warren-knight.com thanks www.seoptimise.com