Matt Brubeck ([info]mbrubeck) wrote,
@ 2008-05-09 21:20:00
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Entry tags:web

Information diet

In an attempt to waste less time on the computer, I'm going on an information diet. I unsubscribed from all high-traffic mailing lists and most high-traffic web feeds. I love Google Reader's "trends" page, which ranks feeds by number of updates, and makes it easy to unsubscribe quickly. It also lets me see my progress:

Graph of Google Reader items read per day

(The really low days in the graph are the weekend, when most sites I read don't publish anything new.)

I moved some of the high-traffic feeds to a private Planet Venus page. Now I can check them if I have nothing better to do, but if I ignore them they'll just fall off the bottom of the page instead of piling up in my "unread" queue.


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[info]habes
2008-05-10 07:44 am UTC (link)
But what if something IMPORTANT happens? You don't want to miss that do you?? :)

Seriously though, I'll be interested to hear how this goes for you. I've always considered you to be someone who is really well-informed about technical issues (and I'm guessing most of your RSS traffic is such). It seems like you wouldn't want to give that up, but I bet you can stay informed about the most important things with only a portion of the traffic.

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[info]mbrubeck
2008-05-11 03:30 am UTC (link)
It's surprising how agonizing it can be, deciding to unsubscribe from a news source. I find that I have a significant part of my identity tied up in what I read. But I found there was plenty of stuff on my list that I am, in fact, happy to miss. Also, I follow a handful of high-quality linkblogs (from Ryan Tomayko, Reginald Braithwaite, Simon Willison, and 37signals) that filter out the best stuff from a much larger set of sources.

By the way, you can check out my "techies" tag page to follow the technology-related blogs that I read.

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