Friday, January 29, 2010

RSS - what I'm reading...and what I have stopped reading.

I have not written a post here recently because I am blogging about parenthood, working on a website, sharing what I read, and Twittering. Over the next few months, I will use this blog to share details about what I am reading and not reading.

The excellent blog Signal vs. Noise inspired me to do this, and Jim Collins inspired them. The idea? A stop doing list. I have written thousands of to-do lists and most of them had things left undone. As SvN puts it, "You need the discipline to discard what does not fit."

These upcoming posts will be an exercise for you and me in discipline. I will begin with my Google Reader. It has replaced most of my newspaper reading and web browsing because I can direct RSS feeds directly into it. (One blog I read, Jewel of the Prairie, recently discovered RSS and gives a great explanation of how to use it. This blog also has a feed.) Recently, I have found that I have subscribed to more things than I have time or energy to read. My first exercise in "stop doing" is unsubscribing from RSS feeds of blogs that don't fit me.

Unsubscribe: Urlesque. This blog bills itself as "Exposing bits of the web." It finds great images and videos but feels like the blog equivalent of that person who forwards everything - scams, funny, pics, jokes, and the warning that Congress is going to take away Sesame Street. It has some great posts - Its collection of the 11 awesomest pictures on the internet was...awesome - but it's more meh than meme to me. I actually dropped this feed a few weeks ago.

Subscribe: My current go-to funny site is Autocomplete Me. Google's suggestions are sometime not what you would expect. Did you know this?

 
Exactly. Now go and see what Google will suggest for you.