I wanted to tell you about a tool I use every day, an RSS Reader. My reader of choice is Newsblur.com. According to Newsblur I’m subscribed to 114 RSS feeds.
“RSS uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video. An RSS document (called “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author’s name.” via Wikipedia
Some people think of an RSS Reader as an inbox, and they see 100 unread stories, and feel overwhelmed, don’t do that. RSS is about scanning, not reading. If there is a feed you don’t care about what happened the last week, mark it all as read and go on. You can also skim through the titles and only read the ones that are interesting.
One of the things I love about Newsblur is that I can train it to show me only the authors or topics I’m interested in for each particular site. There are some sites that have hundreds of stories each week, but I only care about 1 author that writes a weekly on a particular topic. I can train Newsblur to only show me that topic from my favorite author.
The last thing I love, and it might be counter intuitive, is that I pay Newsblur $24USD each year. I love the value that I get from Newsblur that I don’t want them to go away. I think that $24 is a good value proposition and hope to see them succeed.
Other Screen Shots
*headline image courtesy of unsplash and Manu Schwendener