I can’t live without it, but it is creating a serious crisis in my life. Am facing a massive information overload. All because of RSS feeds. I am a confirmed news junkie. Do you know of any de-addiction centres for this addiction – not that I want to attend.
The news that I am interested in the most are Internet Technology & Trends, Gadgets, Current Affairs in India and India Finance Related. I have subscribed to the last two through Outlook as I prefer to read them as and when it’s happening. My preferred source is Reuters and I typically skim through the headlines going on to read only a few of the full articles.
The problem is with the rest. I am subscribed to them through Google Reader.
Key Stats
- # of blogs subscribed to – 16 (only)# of articles I read every day – 180 (wow, that’s big)
- Avg daily articles published by them – 280 (now that’s really large)
- Time I spend per day reading these – roughly around 4 hours.
And I am still not able to follow other stuff which interests me. Example: India specific internet trends, music, juicy bollywood related gossip, food, travel, philospohy and many other random stuff.
As you can see, I am already overloaded but would like to follow more. Therefore my ideal reader program would have a category structure: “category -> topic -> news article”.
- Category is like specific interest areas – music, web 3.0, gadgets. Should be user defineable
- Topics are like a summary of news items within a category. Example of Topics could be “Iphone 3G launch”, “Facebook makes all news feeds public by default” etc
- News Article are the individual posts
- The program should have the intelligence to identify the topics I have highest interest in and sort them in descending order
- It should also have the intelligence to figure out the sources I like the most and sort the news articles accordingly
- It should synchronize with my reading activity on mobile
There are tools out there, notable being Fever, which attempts to achieve some of the above. But the $30 price tag along with a server based installation is a deterrent for users like me. I think the bigger deterrent to me is the server based installation. Till than, it’s hiking the internet galaxy, searching for a better feed reader than google.
One othernotable tool is SharpReader. But this one doesn’t have a mobile client.
Posted by djbasumatari 
