I’ve only recently gotten into RSS. I was just reflecting on why my quick adoption of RSS hadn’t happened before. Is one possible reason the RSS clients that come with pre-filled RSS feeds? Usually these pre-filled feeds are the exact thing you’re trying to get away from.
Aren’t all those feeds commercial feeds overload? Personally, I can deal with maybe 1 (BBC) actual “news” feed in my reader, but even that I had to tone way down. Initially every 20 minutes there would be 100 new developments that I’m supposed to sort through to see if I’m interested.
My current newsreader didn’t come with any pre-filled feeds. It left it up to me to decide what I might be interested in and how to find it. When I do find it, it makes it very easy for me to add the feed with a simple “crtl–option–d” (for discover) to load the feeds from the current browser window automatically. Since starting with this news reader, RSS has quickly become my favorite method of finding stuff I’m interesting in. And a most of it would not be found in pre-filled list for the masses.
Seems like an interesting problem. What’s a good way to direct people to RSS that they personally are interested in. I know there’s a little ad-hoc, tag-based, del.icio.us-style categorization of RSS feeds going on out there? What about automatic discovery of the feeds from the people that are interested in your feeds? And the feeds their interested in? Certainly there could be some common interest, higher signal-to-noise ratio. How does that happen?