Burnham's Beat: Saving RSS: Why Meta-feeds will triumph over Tags

Having just spent an hour cleaning my RSS subscriptions and building an assortment of smart lists in order to bring my feed reading habits back into the realm of the practical, I stumbled upon an accurate description of the disease I was attempting to curb: Feed Overload Syndrome.

I’m not so sure about the proposed solution though: meta-feeds comprised only of metadata about other feeds which, when cross-linked with the originals, would help obtain more relevant results.

Would it reduce the overload? Somehow I doubt it. The problem here is my information anxiety, not the pertinence of my RSS inbox. And there’s my need for serendipity, one of the great byproducts of feed reading....

Then there’s that other problem: my social networks. As they grow, the links get weaker until I just ignore them completely, and I’m not even close to my dumbar number. My real network is measured by an antique: the telephone.