An RSS reset isn’t the same as declaring bankruptcy

When I first started reading RSS Reset: Dump Your Feeds for a Month I focused on the “dump” aspect and my reaction was: “Say it ain’t so!”

There are a lot of us out there who, day in and day out, process vast amounts of information, either out of personal interest or professional necessity (or both).

It’s a not uncommon reality that life will interfere with the quality time we get with our RSS feeds. And, of course, the information stream doesn’t let up as we’re trying to catch up, and so eventually we’re forced to give up.

Result: a declaration of RSS bankruptcy. Or, more extremely, we start deleting feeds wholesale. Declaring “bankruptcy” means marking all feeds, or sometimes just high-volume feeds, as read without actually reading them. This is a tragic last resort, however, and not something to just experiment with willy-nilly — hence my panicked reaction.

To maintain our sanity as information consumers, there are four truths that we have to accept:

1. We can’t track everything. (Not even Robert Scoble can.)
2. Not everything is interesting or relevant. (Plus, memory storage within the human brain is at a much higher premium than it is for data online.)
3. We WILL miss something, some time. (But the big/relevant/newsworthy stuff will get reported by so many people and outlets that it will be pretty much impossible to miss it.)
4. Knowing what’s going on out there is important, but having a life is just as important. (And in the Google Era, the required investment to find/learn something is pretty low.)

At the same time, we fall prey to several bad habits, which, over time, lower the value we get from our RSS reading:

1. We don’t vet very well. (We’ll subscribe to a feed based on one interesting blog post, which could be a relevance fluke.)
2. We don’t read critically. (Sometimes we’ll scan through every item in a feed just because it’s there, wasting time to determine that relevance is low.)
3. We rarely do any gardening. (We don’t take the time to prune out dead feeds, uproot feeds with information we don’t care about and never read, or fertilize our minds by adjusting subscriptions to feeds targeted more accurately to our interests, like PostRank-filtered feeds or topic-specific feeds.)

No wonder we end up declaring whole or partial RSS bankruptcy.

That said, I think an occasional reset is a good idea. And that’s what the ReadWriteWeb folks are actually advocating with RSS Reset Month. Stop mindlessly scanning, clear out the clutter, and start reading smart. Let technology do the heavy lifting. Savour and retain what you read because it really engages you.

The month-long time frame provides time to adjust to reading differently, tweak what works on an individual level, and realize that – hey! – there’s a lot of stuff we’ve been following that we don’t actually miss.

Plus, using PostRank filtering fits particularly nicely with their #4 rule for RSS Reset Month: Allow adding of aggregate, smart or keyword-filtered feeds such as RSSmeme, FriendFeed Friends, or TechMeme.

Of course, re. rule #1 our Google Reader extension is a great way to help you analyze buzz, especially if you make tips like these work for you.

Additionally, the BlogTrends spark line (that small graph that appears at the top of a feed’s analysis) is a handy at-a-glance way to judge a site’s quality over time. And the presence of our widget on sites, displaying display top posts, allows us to judge relevance before subscribing.

Making smart use of available tools to help maximize our information management quality time can negate the need for RSS Reset Month, or — say it ain’t so — RSS bankruptcy.