Skimming Feeds

With the wealth and overwhelming amount of information currently available to us it’s sometimes difficult to know what to give attention to and how much attention to give each thing that’s jumping up and down yelling for attention. I’ve noticed a lot of information duplication in the online world and in some cases I’m all for it but in others it becomes bothersome.

I’ve been following many different blogs and information sources online and have come to settle into a fairly efficient means of sorting the wheat from the chaff. If you have improvements or questions about any of this let me know, I’m still learning.

I’ve set my startpage to Google Reader. I won’t go into the details of Google Reader, but I will say I used to use Pageflakes for reading blog feeds and eventually moved the major feeds into GoogleReader and now keep Pageflakes for more customized/fun feeds and such.
I set the feeds to List view rather than Expanded. I’m surprised how long this took me to figure out. You can see from the screenshots below how much easier it is to glance through headlines in the list view. Until I changed this setting I used to scroll endlessly through the feeds, looking for something good.

(expanded view)

(list view)

I’ve learned to love the “mark all as read” button – especially in conjunction with the list view. Once I’ve read the one or two items I’m interested I mark all as read.

More recently I’ve been using folders to break up subscriptions by category.
Instead of looking at each blog feed separately I can skim through entire categories, doing it this way you’ll see how many blogs post the same post (or nearly identical hot breaking topics).

Now what’s this? Something about Tweetree being able to read blog posts within Twitter feeds?!

Not quite the same as a dedicated feed reader, but interesting – bringing blogging into micro-blogging? Isn’t that like putting Budweiser into a Microbrew?

I’ll have to play with it some more, but it seems like everything appears in a partially “expanded view” without the option to view posts as regular tweets or “list view”.

Tweetree view: