If you’re like me, you have an RSS Reader (like the one offered by google) that’s overwhelmed with backlogged posts from the many blogs you subscribe to.
If you’re also like me, you don’t bother trying to dig back through your pile of posts, overwhelmed by the shear quantity, and uninspired by the fact that most of them are probably uninteresting or unhelpful for your needs. This is surely a problem.
One solution that I’ve been using with good success is to use my twitter account as my new RSS reader. I’ve found that it’s a good place to easily identify, store, read, and redistribute content.
How it works
Every time I see a link I’m interested in, which is quite often, I favorite that tweet. I don’t bother trying to read them as they come; I’m usually busy doing something else, and just checking in on twitter for a few minutes. Then, once or twice a week during set times, I flip back through my ‘favorited’ tweets, opening all the links I previously earmarked for reading.
Why it works
The people I follow on twitter — those within my online community — usually do a good job selecting out content that I’m interested in, and I find I get a varied and vibrant selection of posts to choose from. Best of all, I’m then able to interact not only with the original author (through the blog comments section), but interact with the person who posted the link (by RT’ing them or saying thanks).
Why it wouldn’t
Granted, I miss a lot using this system, and don’t get a representative sample of the blogosphere (reading only what I happen to catch). But really, with all the blog content that exists out there, could you ever get it all? If you really want to read content from one source, you can always navigate there specifically.
Discussion
I’m curious to hear if anyone else has tried this method, and if so, what their experience was. More broadly, I’d be interested to hear approaches to consuming blog content in general, as to how it improves and informs your profession (or not).
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