08 Mar RSS: My Saviour and My Nemesis
Anyone who reads blogs or monitors news on the web will attest to the value of RSS feeds, and I’m no different. I currently monitor around 50 blogs, something that would be an impossible task were it not for RSS delivering new posts to me when they’re published. There’s simply no way I would trawl through 50 websites on a daily, or even weekly basis looking for the latest news. And as for email subscription – it’s fair to say it would drive me nuts having all that in my inbox. The delete key would soon break.
But I’m now finding myself in something of a quandary. Most of the blogs I follow publish anywhere between once and twenty times per week, all of which is easy to manage. But there are two in particular that dominate my reader – Mashable and Social Media Today. I’ve read both devotedly since I started taking this stuff really seriously last year, but as my reading list has grown so has the number of posts that face me every morning when I check my RSS reader.
I now find myself with anywhere between 200 and 300 blog posts to skip through every morning. And as I discover more and more great bloggers with interesting and relevant opinions, that list of posts is only going to grow. The beauty of RSS, and Google Reader in particular, is of course that I don’t read most of these posts – I skim read the titles and only read the ones that I think will interest me. But even so, 300 posts on a Monday morning is a little daunting. RSS is becoming a bit of an addiction, a bit of a pain and a bit of a work adversary. So I’ve been debating unsubscribing from Mashable or Social Media Today, probably the former, in order to make room for more individual writers.
Mashable publishes anywhere between 20 and 40 posts per day, the large majority of which I don’t find relevant for me personally. And yet I do find it really useful for tips and news, and fear I might miss out if I’m not receiving its feed. I don’t have a problem unsubscribing from other blogs that I don’t feel add value to my life, so why does it seem like such a big deal to ditch Mashable? Am I in love?!
What do you think – give Mashable another chance, or dump it and move on?
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