Kyle's Findings.

How I use RSS

Marco Arment recently posted about sane RSS usage, and it pretty much sums up how I use RSS feeds. I subscribe to ~100 different blogs and check my feeds almost daily (using Reeder, which is awesome). Most of the feeds I subscribe to publish less than one post a week, and some significantly less than that. Only a few post new content daily.

I don’t subscribe to major websites like TechCrunch or Engadet. In fact, I don’t even read those blogs. Generally, if one of the major blog networks posts something of interest to me, I’ll eventually find it via Twitter.

The feeds I do subscribe to fall into the exact category Marco describes:

RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites: sites that you’d never remember to check every day because they only post occasionally, and that your social-network friends won’t reliably find or link to.

Many my subscriptions are for smaller, relatively unknown blogs I’ve randomly stumbled upon in my internet travels. Their posts are far less frequent, but when they do post it’s often a new idea that interrupts the “echo chamber” that large blogs & Twitter cause.

I’m always surprises me when another web developer informs me they don’t use RSS feeds. I think feeds are the easiest way to keep up with industry news — far easier than trying to find useful links in a Twitter stream. RSS lets you skim for useful content and ignore the noise quite quickly.

I don’t really see the point of using RSS to aggregate content from major networks. To me, the real value of RSS is being able to stay on top of a broad range of sources that I’d otherwise forget to check.