According to OnlinePress Gazette, The UK Guardian is launching a new web service later this summer that creates an 8-12 page PDF of current news. Content will be updated online every 15 minutes, and the PDF is of course printable. They are targeting people who want to read while commuting. This has absolutely nothing to do with RSS. Or it has everything to do with it. No mention is made of using RSS. A quick search on the Guardian website, which has won a number of awards for their online presence, shows no mention of RSS used as the delivery mechanism for this ground-breaking idea.

This is definitely something I'd want to use on some of my feeds. I'm subscribed to a number of feeds with technically dense content that I'd like to make pencil notes on top of. It's the way I'm used to researching, and I find it more effective than any method that does not use pencil and paper. Otherwise, I get information overload. Speaking of which...

Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press points out that while RSS is a boon for curing information overload, feed items "can pile up much like e-mail." His article talks focuses on the RSS filtering tool Feedrinse, which delivers only those feed items that match your filter patterns, thereby reducing your reading list.

He's made an important point. I just finished clearing out 9000+ feed items over a week, and only two days since, I've already got 4600+ items. Granted, I probably browse 50%, read 20%, and glance at 30% - but it still takes time.

I've talked about feed browsing methods before, so I'm just expanding a bit on previous discussions. Here's a bit of easy math to consider. I now have 436 feeds in my grazing list. I'm adding  10-20 feeds per day - although I occasionally clear some out. Not every feed has new content daily, but some have as many as 40 items.

High-activity feeds get barely a glance. If the title looks interesting, I may browse the content - which is inevitably either short content or partial-text of long content. I still prefer partial-text, but something that has at least 100 words rather than the 10-20 words I see some feeds having, if at all. Although, contradictorily, I've subscribed to feeds in Bloglines in full-text mode lately.

I'm estimating that during weekdays, I'm scanning/ browsing/ reading/ deleting close to 600 feed items per day - more than that on weekends. And lately, Bloglines is showing feeds to have new items when they really don't. That's taking me longer than necessary. Very annoying.

But say I could "scan" an article in 30 seconds or less. I'm guessing; I haven't timed myself. That means 600 feed items is taking me about 18,000 s = 300 minutes = 5 hours. Of course, that's part of my job, researching for my writing. Although, I'm not really reading everything. Not in 30 seconds. So I have to add more time to actually read full articles. How are people who claim to browse 600-700 feeds doing anything but reading all day long? How many feeds is too many?

Fortunately, most blog readers and aggregators have an easy way to unsubscribe from a feed. So culling the list is usually simple. Do you delete inactive feeds? Or do you let them sit in your grazing list, hoping the author(s) will eventually update?

Depending on the website, I sometimes delete a feed. There are a few I'm subscribed to that have had mangled XML for nearly two weeks now, as I mentioned in the last post. Something I'm suggesting webmasters do, maybe once a week, is validate your feeds. There are two easy-to-use services: Feed Validator and W3C Feed Validator. Just enter your feed URL and press the validate/ check button. Both work on either RSS or Atom feed formats.

Don't have a web feed for your site? RSS Scraper will screen-scrape your site and create an RSS feed for you. Only problem is that this needs for you to have the Ruby 1.8 programming language installed. Similarly, Feedalizer is a Ruby code library that scrapes your web pages and creates an RSS feed. Obviously, this too requires Ruby to be installed. So these are RSS tools for techies, not marketing types.

Another techie RSS resource is Blogapps, which hosts Java language-based RSS examples from the Manning Publications programming book RSS and Atom In Action. Although why the front cover has what looks like a bearded bald monk holding a bow (as in archery), I don't know.

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/