Colin's Blog My thoughts on everything.

Melanie Baker
July 10th, 2008 - 14:02

Here’s my dirty little secret… I’m the same as you are, more or less. “What if I miss something?!” :)

I’ve had this conversation with a few folks, and honestly, there are people for whom our service just isn’t suited. They either want to read everything or they want to personally be the ones who choose what to read. Which is totally cool. I definitely get that. And there’re always going to be people whose work you’re invested in and you’ll read everything.

At the other end of the spectrum are the people who want everything to be seamless, managed, and behind the curtain. Just the greatest hits, delivered piping hot, and don’t tell me how you selected them. For those people, and most of the rest of the spectrum, we can be of considerable use. (Whew!)

As for the rarely-good feeds, I’ve pondered that a fair bit, too, since I’ve totally fallen victim to it. You read some amazing post, subscribe immediately, and then six months later can’t remember for the life of you why you did because nothing ever seems to resonate. To that end our widget can help, since it will highlight the site’s material. And if you wanna be all sneaky like, you can see when the “best of” posts were written, and if the dates are awfully far apart, that might tell you what you want to know, too. :)

Bill Deys
July 10th, 2008 - 14:41

I use aideRSS to see what the hot items are but I still read all the items. Well sort of! I don’t know how many feed you guys are subscribed to (I’m at 252) but I can’t read everything.

I use Google Reader so I usually start out with my shared items which I find usually covers me for 99% of the real News type items, then I go through a folder of feed from local bloggers that I’ve found (70 feeds), then Blogs. Now those I scan through all of, reading at least the headline and first bit of the body, this is there the postrank really helps I can see the hot items. After if I have time I’ll start scanning through my “news” folder that has feed like Wired and TUAW.

If I can’t get through it because I’ve read my shared items I usually can Mark All Read and not miss the latest. You do have to have a good “friends” list for this to be effective, that’s why I’m always adding people.

The real flaw I find with postrank is if I read a very fresh item it has no post rank, you almost need to be using it to catch up after a week off!