All the news Part 3

I’ve already posted an RSS how-to, specifically referencing the Google Reader, which is my personally preferred application. I started using GR because for a while I was using iGoogle as my home page, and the reader was right there for the clicking, and the progression just happened. But it was a happy accident. GR does have some nice features for controlling the look and feel, not to mention sharing (and thereby providing the source of the Coachean Feed, which we’ll get to shortly). GR also offers suggestions for new feeds based on the feeds you already source, which has proven quite helpful. I’m sure there’s other comparable RSS products, and if you already have and use one, more power to you, but if not, you can’t go wrong with it. Check out that how-to (it’s on the right over there under greatest hits) for the details.

My history with RSS is complicated. I started with one feed, through MHL, then broke out a second, personal one. Just recently I moved everything back to one feed again (there’s an easy way to do this, where you save your feeds to a file and GR picks them up, not unlike saving your bookmarks to a file and passing them to a different browser). My experience with RSS has allowed me over time to figure new and better ways to parse the feeds so that I can address them meaningfully. Feed management becomes something of an obsession, to tell you the truth. But if you have a hundred feeds in one folder, for instance, your RSS is totally unmanageable and not much different from having a hundred bookmarks in your browser, which is the old way of doing things. You need to divvy them up so that, depending on what you’re doing and when you’re doing it, you can access the ones you want, when and how you want them.

I have, at the moment, 171 subscriptions. That means 171 web sites are sending me updates every time something new happens on them. Those sites are broken down into seventeen or eighteen categories. When I log on first thing in the morning, there are probably a thousand new entries overall, and maybe another thousand accrue (and get cleared) as a day progresses. This is a lot of information. Breaking it down into folders meaningful to me makes dealing with it fairly efficient.

The first folder I check is Debate, which includes the handful of debate blogs including VBD and CP’s rantings and the like. Secondly there is an Ideas folder, which contains feeds most likely to be of value to debaters. These are philosophy sites, deep-background opinion sites, things like that. 90% of the articles I mark for Coachean Feed come from here. Thirdly there is an Opinions folder, which is more newsy and decidedly more loosey-goosey than Ideas, but still occasionally offers useful material. Beyond that, there are some areas of interest only to me (like amusement parks and entertainment stuff such as music and films), tech, science, books. I have a catchall category for general sites like Boing Boing and Digg (both of which are, one way or the other, aggregate sites, like the Feed), which I like to look at but which are not essential. Daily Dish gets its own category. eZines get theirs. And so forth. I’m not recommending you do what I do, I’m just telling you what it is that I do that is working for me.

Needless to say, I do not read thousands of internet postings a day. But once I’ve prioritized all the postings, the reader allows me to get through headlines/distillations at fairly blazing speed so that I can stop and read the ones I want. (GR allows me to switch from pure headlines to longer distillations, formats which I alternate depending on the nature of the material.) When all is said and done I probably spend about a half hour to an hour sorting through this stuff. And as I indicated, I address the debate material first, and repost it to the Coachean Feed by starring it (a retweet without twittering). So what does this mean to you? Well, you can grab the Coachean Feed and know that every single article in it is potentially interesting to someone of a forensician persuasion (or at least an LD or Pffffter persuasion). It may just be articles on human rights absent a specific context, but you can’t possibly not want to know everything you can about HRs, especially articles on HRs selected for you by a debate coach. You pay good money for research if you buy briefs; I give it to you for free.

But I’d be happier if you made Coachean Feed just one of the pages you RSS. It is, by design, specific to our little corner of the mental universe. But I’ll bet that your mind is also interested in other corners. Sure, you can go to those web pages you like, as you do now, and look at their stuff, but this is the same as saying, yeah, I know those mp3s are convenient, but I’ve got enough music already on my 78rpm records. It depends entirely on what you consider “enough.” In the age of the internet, enough is as much as you can get your hands on. Anything less is, well, not enough.

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