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I love you but we can’t go on like this, never talking

April 21, 2008 at 5:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Following Alan Gutierrez’s advice, regarding something I was struggling with anyway, I’ve deleted all RSS feeds from Vienna.

What I’m going to try for a while is going to people’s blogs and looking at them and reading them and seeing what they say and responding in situ. Seeing their design, paging through their long posts, looking at the pictures. Reading their damned ads, even.

That is, having conversations.

I think that’s something I missed about feedreader city. And besides, I think I write less because I’m fed too much.

Plus the only reason I had a mere 9087 unread posts in my feedreader was the preference that only kept the most recent 20 in each feed….

Alan Gutierrez said,

April 21, 2008 @ 5:56 pm

Bill

Yes. Exactly. That is basically what I felt. Like someone was trying to turn me into pate with all these feeds.

Especially as I began to get control of my email, it made it clear that I didn’t want another inbox. An inbox is a message that has been addressed to me, sent to me, that someone has chosen to send to me. I could look at a message an ask, why did I get this and what I am I supposed to do.

Now imagine an inbox where every last message ended with, FYI. You’d probably intervene and tell people not to waster your time forwarding the funny joke they heard or sending you another link to a TechCrunch article. But, it’s RSS, this new technology and it’s supposed to be convenient, it’s supposed to be something we’re supposed to do, so we just plug away at all this meaningless information.

At least with an inbox there is a common thread. It was intended for Alan. With RSS the only common thread is that at some point I found something on someone’s blog interesting and subscribed.

You can’t interact with every interesting person you meet or every interesting source of information you find by committing yourself to reading everything they thereafter produce. At least I can’t.

Once I made the decision to burn my feed reader, I stopped and began thinking about what my strategy is for the information I consume. Well see if communicating via comment sections, Twitter and email doesn’t help me produce more of my own content.

But more than content, I really want to develop an understanding of topics and relationships with people. I’m looking at ways of keeping my media social.

Edward Vielmetti said,

April 22, 2008 @ 1:45 am

It was a matter of convenience to get rid of the Google Reader subscriptions; I never actually read them anyway, not for a while at least.

The next thing I need to undo in my habits is surfing through a very narrow set of blogs, the usual suspects (and I won’t name them) that always have something new and that are bright and shiny like the bottle cap in your eye. ow!

Next: blog rolls! what else are your friends linking to.

I do like the stream of stuff through delicious, which seems to be an alternate to twitter, with links and tags.

David Carlton said,

April 22, 2008 @ 4:23 pm

I never thought of Reader as getting in the way of looking at blogs in situ: I never read the posts in Reader, I always hit the v key to see them in their natural habitat. Reader is just a way for me to do that without making my hands hate me by clicking on hundreds of links; it helps me visit other people, it doesn’t hinder that.

The other thing that I like about feed readers is that it makes it a lot easier to keep track of friends who only posts once a week, or once a month, or whatever. Back when I went directly to web sites, I quickly gave up on sites like that; these days, they’re still sitting in my subscription list, and I’ll learn about what they have to say on those happy events where they have something further to say.

(I do agree that it’s it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the volume of traffic in a feed reader.)

Alan Gutierrez said,

April 23, 2008 @ 1:53 pm

David

I think readers are the worst way to keep up with people who update once a week. With a reader, I have a bunch of messages, when I encounter a friend who updates infrequently, they are usually writing about something that is out of the hype-cycle, something completely different from the other feeds. If don’t have time for them, they get marked as read and I don’t remember them.

It’s much better, I think, to have a synapse, wonder what your friend is up to, and go to their blog. If it is every three months, fine. Spend some time getting caught up and seeing them in their context. Look at a channel of information that is all about your friend and read up on your friend using this cool time lapse of their life. While you’re at it, leave some comments.

This is basically what’s happening now, since I’ve repurposed my time. I’m reading up on Bill, Ryan, Ed and Brian because you’re all in the comments section of my blog.

Simon said,

April 24, 2008 @ 1:43 am

In principle I agree, but having things grouped by context helps a lot.

For example, I have coding (reddit, etc), AI, trading, fun, science.

By clicking each group, I can get in the right headspace for quickly scanning these. I then click through to each website as interest strikes.

It’s a fast way of covering a lot of ground, and inspiring myself in ways that if I had to manually visit each website, I wouldn’t necessarily see (particularly since a lot of the information comes from sites I never knew existed - it is, after all, how I found this site).

However, I do think that getting the NUMBER of feeds as close to zero is very valuable.

Despite my continued efforts in this direction though, I won’t be removing yours :)

Simon said,

April 24, 2008 @ 1:44 am

Ack. Apologies. If I realised your blogging software auto-inserted visual emoticons I wouldn’t have done that. *shudder*

Tozier said,

April 24, 2008 @ 7:28 am

Simon, you describe my standard way of dealing with mailing lists, as well. But you don’t include the overarching binge/purge dynamics.

Ever since they were WAIS servers and LISTSERVs and GEnie groups, I’d go through a period of covering a lot of ground (call it “exploration”) and piling every feed of conversation and recorded knowledge in one sorted place. A folder for the RuneQuest stuff, a folder for the bioinformatics stuff, a folder for the artificial life stuff.

Whether we’re talking about Gopher or RSS, quickly one finds that most—if not all—of the “feeds” are languishing, dead. So then one prunes: save the space and attention by purging all the junk that’s never touched, or full of spam, or noisy. Focusing on the high-utility sources. Call it “exploitation”.

And back again.

I think what’s qualitatively different now is that we’re applying this approach to whole modes of communication, not swathes of one medium. I’m not reading RSS feeds of things now, but am watching more of what people post in my del.icio.us network and Twitter friends list. Less attention to (for instance) the XP mailing list, but more attention to the Pragmatic books.

In starting Not An Employee, I think most of us are finding that face-to-face conversations are more crucial (by far) than any discussion or marketing online.

What we’ll have to see is whether Alan’s and Ed’s and my retrenchment persists, or if we start using simply shift again to some new feed that engages us more. Is face to face always better than email, or just a fad?

David Carlton said,

April 24, 2008 @ 12:46 pm

Alan,

Hmm, I don’t think what you propose (for friends who rarely update their blogs) would work for me. If I visited their blog frequently enough that they typically hadn’t updated, then I’d feel like I’d wasted that bit of time / mouse click, and would probably feel slightly resentful (”why did I bother coming here?”); I don’t want to feel resentful towards my friends.

And if I solve that problem by increasing the time between visits so that there’s almost always something in their blog, then I get the interesting time lapse view; but it means that I’ll be talking about whatever they were thinking about weeks or months ago, which makes it harder to have a conversation with them. (And with other people who read their blog.) And it means I won’t get to check in with them as often as I’d like.

Having said that, I’m quite willing to believe that this methods works better for you than it did for me. And I agree about posts from occasional posters being a bit jarring in my feed reader; I’ve managed to deal with that to my satisfaction, but it is a tension.

hermitlabs, a tumblelog previously said,

April 28, 2008 @ 2:35 pm

[...] driftwood “I think that’s something I missed about feedreader city. And besides, I think I write less because I’m fed too much.” tagged found on 04/28/08 2:35 pm [...]

Edward Vielmetti said,

September 25, 2008 @ 2:42 pm

I stopped reading blogs in a reader, and didn’t go back.

What I did start doing was putting in some pages in a regular review rotation that search for what I was doing in the near (and far) past, which has the effect of revisiting old discussions perhaps long after they happened, and systematically noticing more about how old threads played out.

Edward Vielmetti said,

October 10, 2008 @ 12:25 am

I gave up on some parts of Twitter too, in an appropriately noisy way; those discussions reference Alan’s original, to close the loop.

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/10/twitter-zero.html

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