“I see too many people I know getting caught up in the breathless hype and forgetting to think about whether the latest shiny new thing really matters in the grand scheme of things. Sooner or later the treadmill is going to tire you out…”
When I hear someone complaining about all the feeds competing for their attention, I have to wonder why they don’t just unsubscribe from most of them. Are their aggregators not helping them find the feeds they’re paying the least attention to so they can figure out which ones to unsubscribe from? I regularly weed out the feeds that I don’t spend any time with, so catching up with my unread posts every morning doesn’t turn into an all-day affair.
In my case, part of my “feed weeding” involves getting rid of a bunch of single-topic feeds, then subscribing to one feed that points out the interesting articles in those feeds. Scoble’s link blog, for example, saves me from subscribing to a ton of tech-related feeds. In this situation, Scoble assumes the position of an editor (and I do the same thing with my link blog).
In fact, I could easily get rid of 90% of my feeds if I could find better editors on topics other than technology. Syndication lends itself to the rise of sites that point out the interesting stuff to us, so I’ll wager we’ll see more editors and fewer over-subscribed feed readers over the next few years.