I’m an active user of Google Reader, to put it mildly; but even I can recognize that having an information firehose doesn’t necessarily lead to becoming more informed, still less productive. Fortunately, Google Reader’s own trends feature allows you to easily see which sites you actually read regularly, which makes feed-pruning a relatively simple task.
The problem of RSS poisoning also suggests a few other things:
- The recommendation of the mid-aughts regarding blogging — i.e., post as often as possible, even if your thoughts aren’t fully fleshed out — needs to be discarded. Given the proliferation of content, the motto of a blogger in the 2010s should be, “better fewer, but better.”
- The limited bandwidth that any one person has to process information means that any one author or publication attaining a mass audience will be exceedingly difficult; narrowcasting, or intense readership from a few people will by far be the more likely norm.
- At the same time, some people — and these are likely to be the most widely read people — are going to have to subject themselves to RSS poisoning in order to avoid the creation of thousands or millions of echo chambers. We all have to make sacrifices, I suppose.
