It is hard to keep up with blog feeds. I kind of run hot and cold on whether I think reviewing blogs provides me information useful to my professional interests. Perhaps I value the process of writing more than reading. Having said this, I am also afraid I will miss something. I have decided I need a strainer for my aggregator(s). I think some folks use Twitter in this way. They rapidly scan and look for things to follow-up on. I am not convinced this helps – you are processing shorter prompts, but you read more comments of limited relevance.
I keep searching and exploring attempting to either create a system or locate a tool that will prove useful. Here are the two tools I am presently exploring.
Feedly
Feedly is a Firefox plug-in that synchs with Google reader.
Feedly asks that you classify your themes into categories and that you differentiate favorite and non-favorite feeds within categories. Your actions when using feedly (selecting items to share, what you favorite) influences what is selected for most immediate access.
Fever
Fever uses a different and somewhat mysterious approach to “straining”. This one is not free ($30) and requires that you have access to a server (PHP and MySQL). I am a sucker for tools I can run on my own servers.
There are some similarities – with fever you differentiate those feeds you follow intently (kindling) from those which you sometimes examine (sparks). What fever identifies are trending themes – what topics are hot (I am trying to keep with the fire theme here). How this works is a little unclear. I have included a couple of related articles and one speculates that the categorization process may be based on common “out links” – links of high overall frequency generate a higher temp and also serves to organize posts into themes. Makes some sense.
Both of these services allow you to read feeds in a conventional manner. Feedly offers an advantage if Google Reader is your traditional tool because of the synchronization. If you use multiple “strainers”, you may end up spending more rather than less time. What you star, share, or save (or whatever) with one tool does not carry over to the other tool. So, what I am doing here is still experimenting.
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