I spent some time on Saturday deleting feeds in my news aggregator, Feedly. The goal being to increase the signal to noise ratio.
If you’re not familiar with Feedly, Feedly is a news aggregator that enables users to follow sources, via RSS, or by following key words or phrases, ala a Google News Search. Feedly is available on a mobile devices or desktop.
I use Feedly to monitor news multiple times a day from blogs and traditional news sources. Feedly is my leading source for items I tweet and blog. I listen first, and then engage.
I’ve been using Feedly for more than a decade. My interests on various subjects have come and gone. I look at individual companies, industries and subjects, but not forever.
As a result, my Feedly was bloated. I started to monitor new sources and subjects. I started to set up new folders of these sources and subjects. I started moving some folders to the top of the list and some towards the bottom.
For fear I’d miss something, I never deleted anything. Heck., I didn’t look at most of my folders anymore.
Rather than continue that game, I cleaned things up. I got rid of half of my feeds and folders.
At the same time, I added a folder on legal publishing to listen to the growing discussion about the evolution of legal publishing – law blogs, law reviews, law journals, legal treatises etc.
Here’s what my Feedly looks like now – by folders.
I am starting to use Twitter more as a source of news and commentary, just as I use Feedly – for learning, and as a means of joining in the conversation by blogging or posting on social media. More to come on that.