Warning: How Not To Use Google Reader

December 10th, 2007

About a week ago I thought I would do myself a favor and add news feeds and some of my favorite news aggregators to Google Reader. So I signed up for Digg, Megite, Reddit, my Twitter friends, Techmeme, AppleInsider, CNN, Google News, New York Times, SFGate, USAToday, Yahoo! Finance, etc. This is in addition to the long list of blogs (about 100) that I also subscribe to.

Let me just say that I now have nearly 1,500 articles waiting for me on a daily basis. And even as I try to comb through them, more appear as I mark others read. It’s like a fire hose aimed at my head.

What’s even lamer is I’ve realized some of the larger news organizations don’t provide full articles in their feeds (CNN, Google News, The New York Times, SFGate, USAToday). So there’s an extra click to get through to the actual article on the site itself, rendering the subscription to the feed rather pointless. Yeah, you get a great list of a bunch of headlines but it’s more work than its worth.

This morning my eyes glazed over, and I actually resorted to holding “J” down to blow past a hundred articles and then I thought… what am I doing?

Too much information is worse than too little. I need to do some major Google Reader pruning right now. My new rules are:

  1. If the feed doesn’t have full articles, it’s toast.
  2. If the feed comes from a major news organization or a corporation, it’s toast. I’m supporting the little guy, not folks who just repurpose AP articles.
  3. If you haven’t updated your blog in the past two months, you’re also toast.

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  • Ha ha, welcome to my world...
  • (The ParisLemon feed is not toast) :)
  • I have found the worst offenders for what I referr to lovingly as shit garbage feeds are the MSM one's like CNN and Reuters (which is only slightly better than CNN). Even Ars Technica and Mary Jo have resorted to partial feeds.

    Like you I really dislike partial feeds and while I realize that they are being provided free I still feel like I am being connec or ripped off. What is even worse though regardless of full or partial feeds are those bloggers who post one line posts and the ads take up more space than the useless tidbit we are bing tossed. They might just as well say "We're posting something useless just so we can get the ad traffic"

    Yup .. time to go through and do some cleaning .. but unfortunately with the revamp of Braincell Soup almost done I'll probably be adding as many as I get rid of LOL
  • I once had BBC news and Slashdot in my feedreader, when I used to use Thunderbird for that. Nightmare! I can't imagine what you were doing though!

    My tip would be, if you use a home page like iGoogle, is have the news items coming into widgets on there. You never have to read them, they don't build up, but they are all at your disposal and available every time you open up your browser so you're not out of the loop.

    It's definitely a good idea to have rules for your feeds too, though wiping out ones that don't post doesn't seem that great. They're not getting in your way by being there, but they may return with even better content than when you subscribed.
  • Steven - yep the issue with the partial feeds is it's an extra click for me to visit the actual site. But the partial feed implies that it's more important that I visit the originating site than read the writing. Or, visiting the site is more important than my reading behavior as a user.

    Ads in the feed are also rather annoying. And the partial feed situation make the ads even more glaringly obvious.

    Phil - It seemed like a good idea at the time :) I might reconsider my last hastily decided-up0n rule. Maybe I'll up it to 6 months rather than two. In any even it doesn't seem like my big problem is people posting too little, it's too much senseless stuff.
  • You'd think that bloggers would realize that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face, but many still only offer partial feeds. Quite often, I visit a blogger's site anyway to post a comment, but to be forced to visit the site just to finish reading a post is terribly aggravating!
  • I can't stand partial feeds, so I once emailed a site that I liked and asked them why they only posted a partial feed. Their response was that they didn't know the full articles weren't being posted, and by the end of the week, it was fixed. - It might not work in every situation, but before you give up on a good site, it's worth a shot.

    Another thing that I hate is sites that limit the size of the image in their feed. Often, I use the image as a quick way of determining if I'll be interested in the post, so when I can't see the image, and I have to judge based on reading each headline, it makes me want to unsubscribe almost as much as a partial.

    Thanks for the reminder though; It is about time to do a RSS Spring Cleaning! [Webomatica is staying :) ]
  • I don't have much information about this topic. I am not a programmer as well so don't take tension about the google and other parts. This is all taken care of my programmers. But the most important thing is I have got some good information about this topic, I like blogs because of the same thing.
  • I've always heard that it was good marketing to supply a partial article. That way you won't be posting duplicate content AND you're getting people to your site on a regular basis.
  • Stories for childrens :) But some right info present.
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