Scoble's Trap and The Blogger's Curse

Scoble has gone through a house cleaning in his RSS feeds, which is a great experience, I believe. But his motivation?

[from I’ve shared my OPML, will you?]

Two weeks ago I deleted all my feeds. I'm already back up to 99 feeds. Will be adding more over the next week. I've raised the bar to get added to my list, though. I want to increase the geekiness factor of what I'm reading and get away from the more marketing and business oriented blogs. Why? Cause I want to focus on people building software, since that's what I'm interested in most.

Well, I looked at the list, and at least 10-20 of the blogs there are not geeks building software: apophenia? danah's great, but she's not building anything. BuzzMachine? Micropersuasion? Why not Signal v Noise? Looks like he is building back to the same social network.

I won't give him too much grief -- because I love danah, Jeff, and Steve -- but I think the RSS reader model is too limiting, anyway. Inevitably, you just get a bigger and bigger list. That's Scoble's Trap. The torrent of RSS will always win.

Memetrackers -- a la techmeme and tailrank -- offer an interesting alternative, but I find them too constraining, as well.

What is needed is a periodic break with the collection of people you read all the time. Just like in an earlier post today (see Tearing Down Social Networks To Increase Innovation), it can increase creativity to stop reading old friends for a while, and throw yourself out in the wild.

I am happy to be at the top of Robert's new OPML list (the benefit of the "/" at the start of /Message), but I think he'd feel fresher and greaner if he had 99 names on the list that were harder to recognize.

There are so many bloggers dropping out, finding it less rewarding, stale, and boring. Burningbird closed up shop. Joi Ito and Ross Mayfield take up World of Warcraft. Dave Winer plans blogicide. I think it's because of the rigidity of the social networks implicit in the blogosphere: in our blorolls, in the RSS readers.

Randomly drop 20% of your RSS feeds every month or so. Sure, if you stumble back upon an old favorite, and they catch your interest again, add them back in. But spend a chunk of time out there trying new voices, building new social connections, new sources of meaning. It's the only way to stay green, the only way to break with the Blogger's Curse. The stuff you love will tie you down in cobwebs unless you actively break the links, and read new, unknown and possibly bad writers.

tags: robert+scoble, rss+feeds, scobles+trap, bloggers+curse

Comments

[Usher Lieberman]

Great idea, I'm dropping you. :)
Seriously though, I agree (I think). It does get depressing to see you have 1000+ unread items, and it is not very rewarding to go through and find that a great many of the posts are PR blogo-navel-gazing or lack any real insight or content of interest. If you want to find the "real" voices of the net undiscovered blogs are probably a lot more interesting. I suspect that commenting on their blogs probably is very rewarding for them, and its always nice to know you've made someone's day. So maybe I really will dump all of my feeds, something tells me the world won't end when I do.

[rick gregory]

I especially agree that we need to find new voices. It is far too easy to walk into the popularity box- Technorati's Top 100, the stuff that's hot enough to hit the memetrackers, etc, esp when you seem to be getting information that interests you.

I want a reader that allows me to dial in a surprise factor... to be able to say "Make X% of the feeds in my list something that's not from my subscribed list." This shouldn't be completely random, but should be less related to my current reading than what is produced by most collaborative filtering approaches. Not the next degree over, but two or three degrees away.

In fact, if I give it permission, the reader should be able to look at my other social networks (last.fm, del.icio.us, flickr, etc) to glean a bit more about what I actually am like. Hmmm... maybe the people aggregators and the feedreader folks should chat...

[Marty]

I don't know about "randomly dropping 20% of your feeds" ... but I only subscribe to 20 or so, so perhaps I can't relate to the problem.

I had never heard of you before today - I got here via Steve Rubel's post about the $10,000 month of ads on a baby (more specifically, the words '30" Apple monitor') - but I like the writing that I've seen so far so I subscribed to your feed.

Isn't that how feed management should work? I don't read feeds because they're Steve Rubel or Michael Sippey, I read them because they make me think.

When a feed's content stops making me think, I unsubscribe. Hopefully I'll get a few month's worth out of yours ;-)

[Usher Lieberman]

I like your idea Rick. A collaborative feed filter that accounts for the tastes of all of my networks looking for patterns in the tags and text of what I’m participating in. If you could add to that my NetFlix account, TV watching habits, iTunes, and lots of other information inputs, I should be able to go to any device and be informed of what is available to me *now* on this device – that is of most interest/importance to me. That’d be a pretty cool presence app with lots of algorithmic information about me. Convenient and scary (privacy-wise) as all hell and perhaps within Google’s grasp if you ask me.

[jeneane]

I haven't made it a secret as to where I stand.

The 20 percent idea is good--as long as I'm not in it.

In fact, I think we should outline the whole web, give it a new name, and drop the browser experience altogether--last one there is a rotten egg; winner gets a new iPod! Ready, GO!

Me? I'm off to write Naked Software now.

[mike liveright]

Good idea, but...

I want a Feed reader (and a Bookmarks system) that can gather statistics and perhaps personal Thumbs up/down so that I can see which of my feeds, sites I am regularly reading articles from and which were subscribed to and are no longer active or of interest to me.

The Thumbs up/down would allow me to indicate articles that I felt were good/bad and then have the feeds, sites, get positive/negtive ratings that I could then also used to delete the feeds that I was not interested in

[Dennis Howlett]

A great idea Stowe but one calling for incredible discipline. Isn't it hmuan nature that we gravitate towards those we like plus those we're told are influential. So at THIS moment in time, if you have anything more than a prurient interest in MSFT then you gotta have Scoble on your list.

[Bill Seitz]

I just demote feeds as soon as I feel annoyed by seeing them in my unread list.

(I have BlogLines categories which are basically priority levels - the A list, etc.)

I almost never get below B in a systematic way, but I'll scan the list to pick something to catch up on...

[Stephen Hamilton]

Great idea. Simple way to feel less overwhelmed every time I log into bloglines - I'll do it.

[Mike]

You've sort of stumbled onto evolution via mutation. Reduce it to 0-2% and give a 2% chance to add a new random feed as well and you might ultimately get a better list. Also you could have natural selection mechanisims...

[Mister Snitch!]

My first time here, and this is what I find. What, are you reading my mind?

Great post, and something that (obviously) has been very much on my mind.

[Easton Ellsworth]

Nice points, everyone. One thing I like to do in this regard is sometimes unsubscribe to a feed from within NewsGator AND open up the blog itself at the same time. That way the feed is gone, but I can briefly check out the blog and maybe re-add it right away. So I'm constantly sloughing off dead cells - I mean, er, feeds - and adding new ones. It's hard though, without a savvy computer/robot/doohickey telling me that this feed hasn't been updated in 30 days or that feed is now dead, to keep up-to-date on everything. Hopefully feedreaders will get smarter and help us tackle these problems better.