Jennifer and I have both started new jobs recently, which explains our radio silence lately. As a result of changing jobs however, I’ve realised that my information needs have changed. Both because of a lack of time and because of a change in roles.

As a result, whenever I do get a chance to sit in front of my google reader, I am evaluating everything I read to determine how valuable the information is that I’m getting. In the past week I’ve unsubscribed from around 10 - 15 feeds, but my reader is still looking as crowded as ever so I may have to get a bit more ruthless.

I’m not just cutting work related feeds, I’m also examining the ‘recreational’ feeds I have. I have a large number of tech related blogs that I want to read but I always end up ‘marking all as read’ so I think it might be time to scale them back.

I’ve always had a large number of feeds as I’m always afraid that I’m going to miss out on something (a fear that meant I very rarely missed school and still hate missing work!). But I’m slowly realising that I just don’t have the time (or the inclination any more) to be on top of absolutely everything. If there’s something important happening in another blog, I’m sure that I’ll find out - either through another blog or twitter.

Basically, I’m trying to streamline my information sources. And hopefully this will help me get back into the swing of reading, posting and commenting again and not be overwhelmed by the numbers in my reader!

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I haven’t had a whole lot of spare time in, well, the last few months or so, and my online reading time has been very much curtailed. Because of this (rather unsurprisingly) I haven’t been reading a lot of blog posts. Particularly, I haven’t been reading almost any library related blog posts - I’d rather have the time to read them properly when I do, so I’ve been putting it off. Trying to trudge through this backlog of posts has made me think about how I read blog posts, and what makes me read a post when I’m short on time. And so (and because I don’t have time to write a real post - soon, I promise!), I present my top three things that will make me read your blog post when I’m short on time.

1. Give good head(line)

I read my feeds using Google Reader, and I have it set to show me just the headlines. If I don’t have a good idea of what you’re going to be talking about in your post from the headline, chances are I’m just going to skip it. I want to know if it’s a review or a short link or something not really relevant at all, and I want to know it without clicking through to the whole text (this is particularly true if you’re posting conference notes - there’s almost nothing more uninteresting to me than conference notes, unless it’s real-time conference notes, which are even worse).

2. Name your blog well

I have my feeds listed alphabetically, and I expect most people do too. It’s lazy, but it works. And chances are, if your blog starts with the letter T or below, by the time I get down there I probably have done all the reading I want to. The library community repeats itself a lot (hell, the blogosphere repeats itself a lot - it’s how the whole thing works), so if I’m reading en masse, I’ve probably covered most of the major recent issues by the time I get about half way down the list.

3. Don’t update too often

Whilst there’s something to be said for posting a lot, if I look at a feed that I haven’t looked at in a week or so, and it has double-digits of unread posts in, I’m probably just going to mark them all as read. Or at least not skim them very hard. Marking all as read goes double if you fill out your feed with useless things that I don’t want to read (I’m primarily thinking Twitter and del.icio.us updates here) - if I want to follow what you’re doing on other services, I’ll follow you there. Put the links in your sidebar and don’t bother me with them again.

Ok, ok, so these are all pretty self-explanatory, and mostly just go to show that I have too many feeds to read (a perennial problem of mine), and that I need a better way to manage my information flows (I’ve been playing a bit with Dapper lately - any thoughts on it?). I’d like to hear other thoughts though - what makes you stop in your tracks and not read something? Or what always will make you click into a post?

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I was having a think about del.icio.us last night, mostly because my bookmarks are in such bad shape, and sorely need maintaining. I was thinking about the different ways that people use it, and how it isn’t really actually working for me at the moment, and what I can do to change that.

My account is a terrible shambles. I’ve had it since Dec 2005, and I’ve now got something in excess of 600 items bookmarked, but I’m just not happy with the way I’m using it. I use it more as a surrogate for a traditional browser based bookmarking system (which it is obviously very useful for) and less for keeping track of articles and posts that I’d like to remember or read later (which I’d like to use it for). I’m finding it very hard to change my usage of it, mostly because my tagging is so awful. I have far too many tags, and in the system as it stands, it’s more or less impossible to edit them effectively.

I keep meaning open another account to keep track of all my bookmarks for work, but I keep hesitating, mostly because I know how easy it is to let it all spiral out of control. Do any of you use it for work/professional bookmarking? If so, do you have a better way of keeping it neat and tidy, or have you found that it tends to get messy fast?

I’m anxiously waiting for the beta to become public (there’s a preview of it on Techcrunch). Del.icio.us is such a good service, and very web 2.0 at heart, but it’s no way near as user friendly as it should be, which is a shame.

Only vaguely relatedly, but all the Facebooking law librarians out there should be part of Lo-Fi’s new group ‘UK Law Librarians for Publisher’s RSS Feeds’. We’re going to take on the man and hopefully try and convince the UK legal publishers that it’s in their and our best interests to start publishing this material as RSS. So much easier, so much more current and timely, and so much paper saved from the wastebasket. It’s win-win people. (Also, in the interim, do check out Nick Holmes homebrewed version. He’s a star for putting this together)

While I’m griping about web 2.0 products that are less than spectacular in some areas - why is the groups function in Facebook so poor? I tend to forget that groups exist because there isn’t (unless I’m not looking hard enough) a way of being notified when there are changes to a group. Which is a shame, because obviously social interaction is at the heart of Facebook, and not being able to interact effectively with the groups that you’re involved in is just disappointing.

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The Telegraph has a service (is it new? I’m not sure. I haven’t noticed it before, and it still seems a little unfinished, so I’m thinking it can’t be that old), where you can subscribe to a limited selection of news articles. They have created a few broad categories (sport, news, opinion, business, and so on) and have selected a number of resources that you can feed into an RSS stream. And, somewhat shockingly, they aren’t just recommended Telegraph columns, but things from all over the internet, including columns from their competitors (they offer feeds from the Times and the Guardian).

Now it is very limited (you can’t add in any other feeds, but can only select from what they have made available). And it is a little clunky (it’s all ajax, which I don’t really like as a functional platform - it’s too prone to slowness). But I quite like it nonetheless.

It feels to me like the gateway drug of RSS - not quite as hardcore as setting yourself up with feeds and a feedreader, but you can have a small selection of things to read. It’s the sort of thing you might suggest to your not-terribly-net-savvy parents, or to someone with limited English. You would move on from there to a real RSS reader - probably GoogleReader, as the format is somewhat similar. It’s enough to get you hooked on the crack that is RSS, but not so daunting as having to go out and actually track feeds down yourself. And I really like the fact that they’re not limiting themselves to Telegraph resources, but are expanding their options to other sources. I think it’s worth checking out.

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