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The RSS Beast – we couldn’t have said it better…

Dec 8, 2006 at 12:28 PM by Yaron Galai | View Comments | Permalink

If you’re not sure what outbrain is all about, the following post is for you.

Kohi Vinh over at Subtraction.com feels the RSS pain:

"…I’ve collected so damn many RSS feeds that, when I sit down in front of the application, it’s almost as difficult a challenge as having no feed reader whatsoever. With dozens and dozens of subscriptions, each filled with dozens of unread posts, I often don’t even know where to start.

In the past, friends have advised me to just narrow my list down to a manageable number of essential subscriptions — a bare few that I can consume easily, day in and day out. But every time I try to do that, I find that I can’t really bear to get rid of most of these feeds. They all seem essential, and I’m loathe to give any of them up. Of course, I understand the corollary of that reluctance: refusing to part with most of these feeds means I’ll probably continue to benefit from very few of them."

Matt from 37signals follows up:

"I don’t think he’s alone. A lot of people want to keep up with what’s going on at a specific RSS feed but don’t have the time to read everything there. So people wind up following the advice of Khoi’s friends — ruthless pruning of any feed deemed inessential, even though some of the content there is desired.

If content was filtered better, these on-the-fence sites would at least have a chance to stick around."

Matt goes on to list a few options for sorting through the RSS avalanche.

We’re not there yet, but this is exactly the problem we’re trying to solve at outbrain:
How to combine the collective intelligence of like-minded RSS/blog readers and save you time by floating the best posts and flagging the worst.

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