I spent 5 days away from reader and had about 4500 unread links in just the technology section alone. #fail.
Complete Fail System?
Was my system a complete fail? No I don’t think so, but it was very basic at best. It was scratching at the surface and ok for someone with 40-50 feeds at the most to worry about. But here I have close to 300 blogs I have subscribed to and the system that I had detailed was splitting up the folders into content that mainly spanned around
a) News/Important
b) Thought Leaders/Interesting People
c) Current Interests
d) Fun Stuff.
The immediate problem with that is how to break it down into each category? Guy Kawasaki, is he a thought leader or does he fit into news/important? Where does Techcrunch go? Breaking news? Techonology? Startups?
You see the problem there? There was no clear segmentation and I had followed the wrong principle of thinking every feed of mine should go ONLY into one category or tagging.
Faceted Classification
I realised that I needed a better system to handle this. So I did some brainstorming and since some of my interests lie under UI and UX Design, I found out that there is a term for Organising Information this way called “
Faceted Classification“. There is a subsection under this called “Colon Classification” and brought to the world by , lo and behold, an Indian
Dr.S.Ranganathan (that’s my Grand dads name, not the same person though).
Unlike a simple hierarchical scheme, faceted classification gives the users the ability to find items based on more than one dimension. For example, some users shopping for jewelry may be most interested in browsing by particular type of jewelry (earrings, necklaces), while others are more interested in browsing by a particular material (gold, silver). “Material” and “type” are examples of facets; earrings, necklaces, gold, silver are examples of facet values.
That got me thinking, how can I classify this information better and has anyone already put together a system? Little did I realise what the GTD Google Reader ninjas had in mind for the young padawan. Introducing Sensei’s
Daniel Miessler and the ever favourite
Steve Rubel. Here is the system they follow and something I plan to test out for the next couple of weeks to see if I can get together a good system.
The GTD method of segregating your RSS feeds.
They use a segregation technique based on three main things. Importance, Location and Subject.
Listed below.
a) Importance (how important are these feeds to you?) – Split up into Primary, Secondary and Tertiary.
b) Location (World events, important news etc)- World news, latest technology development, gadget developments, News and Media.
c) Subject (classical organisation)- Currently exploring, but largely UI/UX/Design/Social Media/Writing/Cartooning
This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by a general ranking of importance of the feed (priority), by the specific type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject), or based on where you are (location). So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation. And during lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc.
Steve Rubel focuses on Tagging your posts. This is especially important in an industry like PR where news by the minute has to be read. Luckily, I don’t have to face that torrential overflow of information. But here’s what he has to say.
Tagging is an incredibly powerful tool for becoming a knowledge management ninja – especially in PR. As you’re reading feeds you can tag them for sharing with a select group or for easy retrieval in the future.
For example, let’s say your job is to compile a report to your boss at the end of the week. As you scan, simply tag all of the potential items you want to include with “report.” Now you can easily retrieve these posts. However, there’s more. You can search them too! This is powerful because you are adding a layer of structure to what is basically a giant pile of information that someone else decided to organize for you when the feed was established.
My Basic Folders and Breakdown of Labels.
This section is to tell you how I have started organising my feeds and perhaps show you a tip or two. Feel free to ignore and move on to the next section. What do my folders contain at the moment?
Primary.
– World news.
– Social Media monitor.
– Techmeme and news from there.
– Techcrunch
– Selected Thought leaders who break news (PR/Social Media) (think scoble/brogan etc).
– Digg Technology and News (And reddit and etc)
Secondary.
– UI/UX design
– Engadget
– Thought leaders that are important to read (Kawasaki, Seth etc)
– Digg Gadgets
– Hacker News
Tertiary.
– Cartooning (XKCD etc)
– All Humour
– Friends Blogs
– Various Posterous reads and other interesting people.
– Digg Humour
Design
– Smashing magazine
– Top Designers and bloggers
– Top Design Blogs
Blogs-India
– All bloggers from India duh.
– Friends families and must read people.
– Also people I keep track of like Labnol.
Interesting People.
– contains everyone who has a nice style of writing, this would overlap with someone already put in primary.
Leisure
– Currently everything else.
I personally don’t bring my Humour and other fun links into my news feed. I do however subscribe to Digg/Reddit’s front pages so that I’m not left behind on some of the most interesting conversations.
Putting it all together
All of the above was for you to get the idea of where I come (no pun intended) from. To put it quickly.
Organise your feeds into areas of importance. This is easier said than done, but try and it will get easier later on. What is most important to your job and your personal interest should be read within the primary and secondary folders. What you read at work should strictly be only the news. Worldwide and in your industry.
For everything else put a label: Design, entrepreneur, leadership, productivity. Have tons of them doesn’t matter make sure you have one feed in multiple categories if you so desire.
Tag everything that you have with smart tags : GReader has a great search and tagging system that you can liberally use. At the same time you can also use fun stuff like Sort by Magic that lets you play around with your feeds.
Observe Trends : This is really important, if you see feeds that you are reading and don’t see them in the active section, eliminate them. My
good friend Dash puts in this helpful tip, “
I just have 2 categories – daily and weekly … each starts with all posts read at the end of the day or the week. Plus I don’t do any reading in the reader. everything opens up in a new tab. just that one additional click will force you to ask the question, “is it worth it?” And any feed that I haven’t read for 4 weeks goes out of the OPML”.
Share everything on KarthickGopal.com: Really important tip. Self explanatory.
What are your tips? Share them in the comments.
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After repeatedly toying and re-iterating, i’ve found salvation in a similar “classification by importance” process.
I place my most important feeds right at the top. The others i categorize in folders below. so when i open up GReader, the top posts show up screaming for attention. The other good-yet-not-pants-on-fire-important feeds are neatly categorized in folders for later perusal.
taking Design sites as an e.g: Sites that post once a while but good stuff go under the main “Design” category (forabeautifulweb.com, veerle etc). I adopt a categorization for mass post sites. Design sites like Smashing Magazine/noupe etc go under a folder “Design-Diarrhea” where they mass post good content. When it’s time for speed-feeding (like the whole speed-reading thing) i quickly go through the Diarrhea suffixed categories.
If however the stuff is really important and deserves a daily review, they go right at the top without any folder categorization. I aim to keep the unread count of these at 0. Techcrunch/Lifehacker should typically go under tech-diarrhea but since they post stuff i feel the need to read on a daily basis, they get moved up without any categorization.
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