> To me, the beauty of Google Reader (and iOS apps like Reeder) is the ability to sift through a lot of incoming information and DEAL with it, e.g. send it to Pocket, Pinboard, Evernote, etc.
Exactly. I skim over 90% of my feed marking as read after glancing at it (for high-volume feeds e.g. "planets" the title is enough to know whether I want to read it or not), read 9% of the incoming content directly in the reader, and send the 1% left either to my browser or to a "read later" service for deferred reading later on. My incoming queue gets handled at once, a few times a day.
Shoving all that into a "read later"? Not going to work.
A large number of my RSS feeds are subscribed exactly for the purpose of skiming. They fall into a couple catagories:
* Sources of headline level knowledge - basically things I note just to keep my brain up on things to search for later should they become relevant. Also useful for the occasional underreported story I'm actually interested in.
* Light reading - there are a ton of comics and blogs that I enjoy for light reading at the bus stop or whatever, enjoyable but really just skimming, or other not-deep forms of reading
* Feeds with occasional good content - basically i don't care about most of these articles, but they provide a gem often enough that I should monitor their content.
And various combinations of these. Product blogs or project blogs are good examples of this. I want to know when the new version is out. I don't care how they solved problem X, but the problem Y writeup may really interest me.
Spot-on on all points. Also of note, there are "noisy" pre-aggregated feeds out there which are useful for discovery of new authors or blogs, but have content wildly varying in quality or interest.
Comments
> To me, the beauty of Google Reader (and iOS apps like Reeder) is the ability to sift through a lot of incoming information and DEAL with it, e.g. send it to Pocket, Pinboard, Evernote, etc.
Exactly. I skim over 90% of my feed marking as read after glancing at it (for high-volume feeds e.g. "planets" the title is enough to know whether I want to read it or not), read 9% of the incoming content directly in the reader, and send the 1% left either to my browser or to a "read later" service for deferred reading later on. My incoming queue gets handled at once, a few times a day.
Shoving all that into a "read later"? Not going to work.
If you "skim over 90%" you might want to just try unsubscribing for a week or two and see if those 10% really matters to you?
A large number of my RSS feeds are subscribed exactly for the purpose of skiming. They fall into a couple catagories:
* Sources of headline level knowledge - basically things I note just to keep my brain up on things to search for later should they become relevant. Also useful for the occasional underreported story I'm actually interested in.
* Light reading - there are a ton of comics and blogs that I enjoy for light reading at the bus stop or whatever, enjoyable but really just skimming, or other not-deep forms of reading
* Feeds with occasional good content - basically i don't care about most of these articles, but they provide a gem often enough that I should monitor their content.
And various combinations of these. Product blogs or project blogs are good examples of this. I want to know when the new version is out. I don't care how they solved problem X, but the problem Y writeup may really interest me.
Spot-on on all points. Also of note, there are "noisy" pre-aggregated feeds out there which are useful for discovery of new authors or blogs, but have content wildly varying in quality or interest.