This morning I Steve Rubel had a video interview that Tim Ferriss did with Robert Scoble. Tim, of course, is the author of the very interesting book, The 4 Hour Workweek. Still haven’t read it. It’s buried under the stack of books I’ve yet to get too.
Anyhow, Tim interviewed Scoble on how he effectively uses his feed reader to read more than 600 feeds…daily. Yes, daily and sometimes twice per day.
What’s interesting is that Scoble mostly reads smaller, niche blogs instead of the higher traffic ones like Digg or Techmeme. Scoble mentions in the interview that he is mostly looking for blog posts stories he can share with his readers. He also makes it clear that it’s about conversation and relationship for him by saying:
“…for me it’s relationship work. I want to keep in touch with what Phil Wembly is doing or thinking or seeing. Therefore when I meet him at a conference next week I’ll have something to talk with him about. …That’s one reason I’m reading so many feeds. …And you can’t get that from reading Techmeme. Techmeme’s another good way to filter a thousand good blogs down to twenty good ones. But you miss the small stuff; people’s birthday and their kids and stuff like that.
Take a look at the video. It’s about 11 minutes and definitely worth the watch. Find out what feed reader people think is best. And read what Scoble feels is an RSS mistake many people make.
How many feeds do you read? How do you manage them? And what reader are you using? And Why?
Cool video.
I subscribe to over 40 feeds through Firefox Live Bookmarks but I don’t check all of them every day. Maybe I’ll use some of Scoble’s tricks and then I can cover 10 times as many feeds 🙂
Hannes,
I have 193 feeds currently in NetNewsWire. I categorize them in six ways to make reading easier…
1. Bloggers I personally know, I read daily
2. Bloggers whose content is so good I read them daily (like Copyblogger)
3. Key phrase search results on topics in my niche – I scan daily
4. Bloggers in my niche who often have interesting views – I may scan daily, maybe not
5. Bloggers who are not in my niche who may sometimes have interesting views – I may scan daily, maybe not
6. New blogs I find that I want to watch – I scan every couple of days
I scan for topics in #1-3 everyday (about 100 blogs). The other three categories I scan if I have time or want to see what people are talking about. I’ve had as many as 300 blogs and as few as 90. This breakout seems to work really well for me. Using the folders in NetNewsWire (and in Google Reader) I can scan all the posts in a folder in one broad stroke.
I can’t imagine doing 600 though. Of course, I have kids too.
Geez. I didn’t realize how much like Scoble I am. Don’t know really what to make of that. 🙂 Thanks for the vid – very good stuff.
Easton,
Funny, you actually remind me of him a bit.
Do you really watch 600 blogs in your reader?