Dealing with feed overload

May 18th, 2007
By Noah (tips)

I’m sure there are dozens of ways people are coping with news feed overload. I thought I’d share a technique I recently stumbled upon by playing around with my Google Start Page (iGoogle, now).

First off, I use iGoogle as my start page and have been for a while. It works quite well for me because I tend to use a number of Google services (GMail, Google Docs, Calendar, Analytics, Adsense, Adwords–I lose track of how much I use Google). There always seems to be a widget to help me either use Google or keep track of my day to day web life (I particularly like having an open text field I can quickly type notes in without having to open up a program or email myself something).

I also use the Google Reader widget to view my feeds from various blogs, websites, custom searches, etc. My problem was I had way too many feeds trying to occupy a tiny, 10-line Google Reader widget on my start page. If I blinked, stories could have moved down and off the first screen. I thought to myself… “man, I wish I could have more than one of these Reader widgets on my start page.” Well, you can!

Just go find the widget in the widget library (like usual) and just add another one… and another one, if you want. I quickly loaded up the full Google Reader app in another window and organized my feeds into different folders (news, web-dev, and local blogs, for example). I then went back to my Google Start Page and set each of my 3 Google Reader widgets to the 3 different folders. Presto! I had 3 differently categorized river-of-news feed widgets staring me in the face.

“The test,” I thought, “will be if Google can remember which folders I want displayed day after day.” So, I hit refresh–even closed my browser and came back–and the separate folders held!

Ok, so maybe I get a little too excited over small victories. I just feel like I’m getting a little closer to that virtual newspaper of the future I kept reading about in college. You might take this feat for granted, but intelligently combining and sorting this amount of content across this many completely different publishers in such an elegant and simple way was not possible much more than a few years ago (at least, not this widely available).

Viva feeds!

One Response

Friday, May 18, 2007
Mark Fulton

Good idea, I use Google homepage too and my RSS feed subscriptions are getting way out of control. Might have to give this a try.

Projects