I had a chance tonight to take a step back to look at how I was using RSS (through Bloglines) to aggregate news sources and came to an interesting conclusion: I prefer secondary news sources. What does that mean?
Over the past few months my RSS subscriptions have grown to close to 125 feeds. This is not a record for hardcore RSS junkies, but it was enough to deliver at least 1000 fresh headlines a day to me from newspapers and blogs. This became a problem when I found myself putting off reading valuable sites where I knew the writers tended to write longer (yet worthwhile) articles. Scanning a large volume of headlines is not nearly as valuable to me as absorbing the content contained within interesting news stories and blog posts.
I decided it was time for me to purge sites that did not delivering useful content. And where did I start: The Official Google Blog. People who know me will likely think, “Ed, aren’t you a search engine marketing geek? How can you ignore what Google reports on its blog?” Well, it turns out that I can ignore Google directly, yet still keep up on their every move due to the coverage of Google provided by other sites I subscribe to. For example, John Battelle, author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, offers more coverage of Google than Google does. And Battelle represents one of at least a dozen sites I subscribe to that track Google’s every move. The beauty of secondary news sources is I tend to get the news bundled with commentary from people I trust. I let other bloggers edit my Google news for me.
The same thing works with political blogs. No matter where you stand politically, there are blogs that share you world view. If you can find bloggers with similar values who have more time to keep up on the news of the day and package that news into bite sized editorialized chunks, you can stay informed in less time.
Is this really better than subscribing to traditional media sources? That’s for you to decide. Personally, I don’t care where my news comes from as long as I understand the bias of the people creating it.
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