When did feed reading become such a burden? I recently thought back to when RSS and syndication were brand new buzz words. When feed syndication was first introduced, supporters raved that RSS would save you time, right? Instead of navigating to 20 different websites to keep current on important news, RSS enabled important news to be syndicated directly to us.
And yes, subscribing to feeds increased my productivity - back when I only had 15 - 20 feed subscriptions. Now I have 87.
How many do you currently subscribe to? 50? 100? 200? Most people don’t have time to keep current with many more than that, right?
For me, the time it takes me to navigate through the daily posts of 87 feeds kills any productivity that I initially gained through feed subscriptions.
The Problem with Most Feed Readers
People don’t subscribe to feeds. We subscribe to information. Simple, right?
Most feed readers drop the ball; they only actually give us half of what we need. When we subscribe to feeds, we want to be fed information - yet most RSS readers are incapable of this. Instead, they just aggregrate feeds.
What’s missing? Getting the feed contents from the aggregator software into our brains. We want the information. We don’t subscribe to feeds so our RSS reader can simply hoard information on our hard drives, right?
You may have already heard some buzz around BlogRovr already, but I think it’s so fantastic that it’s worth another mention.
Brace yourself ** Bold statement ahead…
I believe BlogRovr is opening the door to to the future of feed management.
How BlogRovr is Better
BlogRovr doesn’t just aggregate your feeds and hoard all that information. No! BlogRovr actually brings you the posts from your subscriptions that are important to you. Contextually. Based on the current web page that you are viewing. If any author that you subscribe to has posted about topics that relevant to the web page you are reading, BlogRovr provides links to those posts in real time.
To fully utilize BlogRovr, you need to download their firefox extension. Through the Firefox extension, BlogRovr displays contextually relevant blog posts from feeds that you already subscribe to.
I suppose you could use BlogRovr like any other ordinary online feed reader, but oh… what a waste that would be. BlogRovr is different than any other feed reader I’ve used.
It’s more efficient & it’s far more useful.
BlogRovr brings the important posts from your feeds directly to you - when most you want to read them.
BlogRovr enables you to grow your knowledge and, in my opinion, allows you keep current with 10x as much feeds as you are currently subscribed to.
With BlogRovr, you could literally subscribe to every single relevant feed on the web. Even 1000s of feeds. I haven’t yet subscribed to 1000s yet, but I can’t see why it’s not possible. You could basically subscribe to every single relevant author or news source in your field - and drag them around with you as you surf the net.
BlogRovr basically helps you connect the dots quicker on information that you find important. It adds a contextually relevant layer of information to any website that discusses topics that interest you. This allows you to surf the web accompanied by the the topical experts who you already respect.
A Learning Management System for a Dynamic Environment
I think it’s a safe bet to say that as a community, we don’t lack information. We have tons of information, more than we could ever sift through. Our feed readers have no problem collecting information.
Up until now, feed readers have been selfish programs. Hell, we want to read our feeds too!!
BlogRovr feeds you! I see it as a learning management system designed to enable you to incorporate new information from many many sources — without spending hours picking through your feed subscriptions.
Did I mention BlogRovr has a direct-to-Twitter feature?
