Gregory Todd Williams

Jon Udell was recently discussing aggregator interfaces, and the potential to become “overwhelmed by thousands of unread items”:

Yet I never feel that way. I suspect that’s because I’m reading in batches of 100 (in the Radio UserLand feedreader). I scan each batch quickly. Although opinions differ as to whether or not a feed should be truncated, my stance (which I’m reversing today) has been that truncation is a useful way to achieve the effect you get when scanning the left column of the Wall Street Journal’s front page.

This got me thinking about all the data I take in. On a daily basis, I read 172 weblogs (with 10 more that I consistently ignore unless I’m really desperate for news), keep an eye on the #foaf and #rdfig IRC channels, and read new messages posted to: perl6-internals (which comes in as an RSS feed), rdfweb-dev, dashboard-hackers, mt-dev, and USSC case law.

NetNewsWire’s three-pane interface, with feeds grouped into folders by topic, works wonderfully for me. Instead of scanning truncated content (like “scanning the left column of the Wall Street Journal”), I scan the post title’s, and end up opening about 30 posts in Safari per refresh (roughly three times a day).

On some days, it’s a struggle to keep up with it all. And, yet, there are other days when I’m eagerly clicking the refresh button in NetNewsWire more often than the automatic refresh because I feel a need for more to stimulate my brain and the mailing lists are quiet, everybody’s asleep on irc, and no one is online in iChat.