| « The Diary of Alan Gutierrez |
Burn Your Feed Reader: How to Make Sure Your Feed Reader Is Always At Reader Zero
April 21st, 2008(Update)
Barren Vending, Powerfully Clean by Adam.
I’m familiar with two separate feed readers. You’ll have to adapt these instructions for your feed reader.
Permanent Reader Zero for NetNewsWire on OS X
To perminently achieve reader zero for NetNewsWire on OS X
- Open the applications folder.
- Drag NetNewsWire to the trash.
- Empty the trash.
That was an afterthought, though. My main feed reader was Google Reader. Getting Google Reade to perminant Reader Zero was a more complicated procedure.
Permanent Reader Zero for Google Reader
First, delete all your subscriptions.
- Go to Settings link in the top left corner.
- Click on the Subscriptions tab.
- Select All N Subscriptions where N is the depressing number messages devoid of context that are ready to either consume your precious time and attention or else suck away at your sense of accomplishment.
- Click the Unsubscribe button.
This is not enough. If you are like me you have been creating a mound of items that you swear you’ll read some day using tags and stars.
Burn it.
- Go to Settings link in the top left corner.
- Click on the Tags tab.
- Select All N Tags where N is the number of meaningless entries in your meaningless taxonomy that you’ve created in a deperate attempt to reattach contextual information to data that has been stripped of the context of location, graphic design, information design and referring links.
- Uncheck Your starred items and Your shared items because you are not able to delete those.
- Click delete selected.
There is no way to remove all your starred items at once. In order to achieve Permenant Reader Zero, you will have to unstar them manually.
I unstarred mine by pressing j and then s over and over again. First, I selected Starred items in the side bar. The j key moves the focus down one. The s key toggles the star. It did not take too long and it felt good to have them all gone forever.
You can unshare items selecting “Your shared items” by pressing j and then shift-s over and over again.
Now, if you reload, the intro to Google Reader introduction video with Chris Wetherell will appear. It as if you’ve never been here before. If only that were the case.
Burn Your Reader and Salt the Earth
Now, salt the earth. There are items shared by your friends. These are compelling, they are your friends after all. Unfortunately, these soulless items are still entirely devoid of context. Nothing will prompt you to contact your friend. It as if you are looking at your friend through Argus glass. It as if you were a lost soul walking among us wanting to speak with living, but only able listen.
For each friend under Friend’s shared items.
- Click on the friends name.
- Click “Hide Alan” or whatever you’re friends name maybe.
If you feel bad about this, you can make yourself feel better by visiting your friends blog and leaving a meaningful comment after reading one of their posts.
How to Maintain Permanent Reader Zero
Now you can breathe. You will no longer feel that pang of defeat as you mark all as read. You’ll no longer have to deal with an endless torrent of decontextualized prose that exhausts you with rapid context switching.
Instead, you will follow the whimsy of your thoughts by searching for information as ideas occur to you.
From there you will explore information using hyperlinks. This information will be context rich. It will be packaged in websites. If you’ve been struggling to maintain context with tags, you’ll be pleased to know that websites employ graphic design and information architecture communicate information. From each website, you can further explore topics by following hyperlinks to other relevant websites.
This process of exploring websites by following hyperlinks is called surfing.
You will search for answers. You will surf for new information and ideas.
Information will not arrive, it will be discovered. This is a very natural way to learn about new topics and to take ownership of new ideas.
One Link Closer to Humanity
You’ll learn to get answers by asking other people. You’ll learn to obtain new information by exchanging information with other people. This, of course, puts in active communication with people, instead of being a passive consumer of feeds.
Feeds are eroding your social skills.
Instead of consuming a person’s feed, you will now visit their blogs. When you do, you are in for the whole experience. You get the context of their blog, the photos and links in their sidebar. You can browse into their articles and see who has left comments.
Leave a comment. Take the time you’ve saved and contribute to the blog of a friend or someone you respect.
You will obtain more information in this way, than if you were scanning feeds.
Information is not consumed, it is socialized.
Update: Bill Tozier has followed suit as noted in his post I love you but we can’t go on like this, never talking.
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Comments 
Some day I will have the courage and fortitude to blaze a trail to RSS ZERO. Unfortunately, until I can figure out how to read all my favorite stuff more efficiently than ans RSS reader I am forced to use one.
Although, I don’t feel the least bit of regret when I hit the “Mark all as read” button in Google Reader.
My reader is regularly at 1000+ items and it doesn’t really bother me. My goal is to eventually get down to 50 or 60 subscriptions (I’m at 184 today). But I’m still ok with hitting the mighty “Mark all as read” button every now and then to cut the flow of info.
Hope to see you Wednesday at the AEA/BarcampNOLA gathering.
- Dave
Dave
I didn’t know you’re going to be there. That’s pretty cool. I’ll try to be there myself.
One more thing about the put the web in my inbox model that doesn’t work is that I spend so much time weeding through something like Gizmodo, I don’t stop and read the lower volume websites in my feeds. They only appear every once in a while. Infrequent posters usually put something out there that is not found in the hype for the day. It’s a departure that requires some context switching, special consideration.
Thus, I’ll start it, or bookmark it, but then I have another inbox to weed through. This one is full of stuff that is guaranteed to be dense and time consuming. That is one that I never visit.
So, I find that RSS is great if you want to look at a blur and see everyone parroting what was just posted on TechCruch, but if I really want to visit an issue or area of interest, it’s much better to visit a website when I’m of a mind to get caught up in that area.
Ahh yes, the Gizmodos of the world…
I’ve created a folder (or tag in Google Reader) called “fire hose” that I put all the crazy 40+ post-a-day blogs (Lifehacker, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, etc) into.
I only drink from the fire hose when I have time to blow (which is rarely). I hit the “mark as read” button more often on these blogs. I should probably just unsubscribe from them and not worry about it.
I am in awe of your RSS nuke-job.
So, funny. I had a fire hose folder (actually tag) as well. It was so hopeless. I ended up spending too much of my time at Lifehacker, which is one of the ironies that Merlin Mann likes to quip about. Spending hours reading though feeds on how to improve your efficiency. That is one of the ironies that lead me to burn my feed reader.
This story in the New York Times, The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors, was also influential.
Basically, I didn’t gain anything from visiting my feed reader. I gain much more from Twitter, email and now from this little conversation here, as well as stopping by your blog now that we’re connecting again.
My plan is to seek out information from the people I’m in touch with. Conversations not rivers.
Done!
Vienna makes it easy to delete all feeds.
[...] Alan Gutierrez’s advice, which was something I was struggling with anyway, I’ve deleted all RSS feeds from [...]
Bill
As noted on your blog which I’ve gone and visited and commented upon — because I have repurposed my RSS time to permit socialization — I like your observation ” And besides, I think I write less because I’m fed too much.”
I’m far more interested now in creating content collectively, which is a better way to learn than to consume everyone’s feed passively, like a goose being fattened for pate.
When I think about it that way, I’m probably more likely now to comment at other blogs, but at the blogs where I know the author or other commentators are going to respond to my comments. The idea of creating content collectively has always appealed to me. Rather than parroting what’s on TechCrunch, is it possible for a group of people to converse a topic into a new, uh, meme, or maybe it’s not so important to create ripples in the blogosphere as it is to develop a new understanding of a topic at hand.
Reader Zero! Inbox Zero!
I’m waiting for the day for Computer Zero! Turn it off, turn it all off. Find a fax machine, or a photocopier, or a mimeograph machine, and avoid the technology of today (and the cynical attention-stealing economy that drives it). Stand on a street corner.
“I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.” - LCD Soundsystem
[...] Alan’s Blogometer “You’ll learn to get answers by asking other people. You’ll learn to obtain new information by exchanging information with other people. This, of course, puts in active communication with people, instead of being a passive consumer of feeds. [...]
Shouldn’t you be disabling your RSS feeds and follow-up email notifications for comments to encourage us to come to your site instead of aggregating your content?
I can appreciate the overload issue, but honestly, you get what you subscribe to. Most of my feeds have a context (the feed for this site, for instance) that I don’t need to visit the site to “get”. A good pruning now and then keeps the flow of info at a stream level before the rushing torrent ever gets started.
It’s funny that the feed reader gets this treatment, but you follow over 200 people and tweet dozens of times a day; does that torrent of information get the same treatment next?
[...] Gutierrez says Burn Your Feed Reader: How to Make Sure Your Feed Reader Is Always At Reader Zero. Entertaining, but s following ZERO [...]
Ed and Ryan
My response to your comments got so long that I’ve got my next post on this topic. This is actually abbreviated.
Ed
Not computer zero. This isn’t discarding the web or the web as a source of information. It’s discarding the ludicrous notion of funneling the web into an inbox and using inbox management strategies to read the world wide web.
There are so many ways in which this model breaks down. There are so many ways in which this model disposes of context and cues. It overwhelms.
It’s like going to the library and checking out every book.
Rather, it is like going to the library, running through the isles, opening a book, ripping out a page and reading it as you run to another isle in another section to grab another book and rip out another page.
There is something about RSS that destroys context and therefore value of information.
Ryan
You get what you subscribe to is a huge problem.
If I’m slogging through Gizmodo in my limited Internet time, absorbing the memes and cross-referencing them against Lifehacker and Boing Boing, only to finally notice a new post at You Know What Part, but now how am I supposed read this? I don’t have time and I still have to get through Ajaxian. I mark it as read.
You post infrequently, Ryan. I should read your post. But, you’re marked as read. Tomorrow there will be a whole new load of Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Boing Boing, and Ajaxian coming down the chute.
The notion that if it is important it will come up again is false. If Gizmodo things it’s important, if the thought leaders think it’s important, it will come up again. That doesn’t mean that it will be important to me.
My relationships are important to me. I want to put the social back into social media.
Regarding Twitter. Burning my feed reader is prompted in large part because of the positive experience of Twitter. I have my email inbox under control as well. It was this feed reader concept, this concept of funneling that web of the world wide variety, into an inbox that is just such a very bad idea.
“Rather, it is like going to the library, running through the isles, opening a book…”
You’re doing it wrong. Ed’s right: if you’re abusing the service, you shouldn’t expect to reap the rewards of that service.
I’ve given up on sites like Gizmodo. They don’t exist for information delivery, they exist to whet the appetites of the technorati lemming class. (iPhone! Ooooh! Small PC! Aaaah! Shiney Mac! Woot!) Subscribing to sites like that is committing to an S&M relationship.
I would challenge you that if RSS is destroying your context, the way that you use RSS is wrong. For instance, I subscribe to Stupid Evil Bastards site and shared Google Reader items. Les is a smart guy that I enjoy reading and his shared items are contextualized by the body of his work that I read. If something piques my interest, I comment and subscribe to the notification service for that post. That’s a pretty rich interaction, very social.
RSS enables that, it doesn’t diminish it. If you’re not able to get that experience, you’re doing it wrong, as the meme goes.
@ryan - what part of ann arbor do you inhabit? do say hi some time.
RSS is super useful, even if you don’t read it in a blog reader. Some examples -
In Safari, you can switch from full page view to RSS view of a site, and get a neat little x-ray vision of a site.
With the Socialtext wiki, you can embed an RSS feed into a page, and see headlines.
I’ve done neat stuff with mixing up data from the Ann Arbor District Library, search results reported as RSS.
RSS is rip, mix, burn - but not necessarily the sort of thing you want to mush all together into a heap and read as an inbox.
@bigeasy -
Some days I think that computer zero is the right thing to do. At the very least, we need to start to re-learn how to have productive and envigorating days with some connection to “the net” without having a keyboard in front of you.
Ed,
I’m in Chelsea, actually, but work for the U near the stadium. I signed up for A2B3 a long time ago and have spectacularly failed to make it to lunch even once.
As for the inbox model, for me, it simplifies how I read the web. For many sites, it improves the experience because their site layouts and designs are bad or hard to read (AAiOR, for instance; light text on black background are hard for me to read). Others, not so much and I still hit those pages individually if the mood strikes me.
But I just don’t get the loss-of-context-through-consumption-model argument. The context is there, but if you’re trying to consume too much information, it’s a volume issue. Good flavors are drowned out by too much spice, that’s why a good cook knows when to stop seasoning.
I also don’t get the guilt of not reading something. If I don’t read all my feeds, I take that as a good sign, that I had something better to do (or more important, anyway) for a day or two. I read the tags that are important and then hit Mark All Read for the rest. Hitting Mark All Read on 1000+ unread items, and not worrying about missing something, is a pretty good feeling.
Ryan
I’m going to continue to make case against feed readers and with zeal. I do feel that it is the wrong paradigm.
I want to build an information strategy around browsing.
I’m using Google Bookmarks and at Comment tag, to note the places where I’ve left comments. I’m following a play the ball where it lies attitude, so that I’ll leave a comment in the context where it struck me. As I develop a life stream for this blog, I’ll find a way to track those comments and post them here in the life stream. I know about co-comment, but I’ve never enjoyed using it.
Google History would be nice. I’ve always wanted to be able to search the subset of the Internet that is the Internet that I’ve seen. I use Safari now, though, so it doesn’t work for me. It is also scary thing to have Google tracking my browsing, but almost worth it.
Thus, I don’t want to have a huge list of posts to read. I do want to explore. It is much easier to say that I’ve consumed enough for one sitting with browsing. It gives me a much better sense of how much time and effort I’m putting into my time with the web.
I’m simply expanding outward from a starting point, which is either a familiar site or more likely a search term. I’m looking for information to weave into my understanding of my areas of interest. There is a structure to this, and it’s more productive than scanning an arbitrary new stack of blog posts. With RSS, I’m pretty much throwing out the long tail.
Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero works for me with email. I’m disciplined in inbox zero in an inbox environment. To get out of that discipline I need to get away from an inbox. Once I’m away from the inbox, I can begin to consider a new decision tree for information that I encounter while searching and surfing.
Ed
I assume your talking about connectivity to the net using mobile devices. I’m sure we’re getting there as a society and I’m sure there are other societies getting there ahead of us.
I’m thinking about creating an online events calendar that is mobile enabled for New Orleans. I’m talking with David Herrold who commented above. He has encouraging me to do it. He does mobile content for chron.com. Mobile events for a walkable area of New Orleans might be the basis for a revenue stream for Think.
Alan -
I’ve been trying (and trying and trying) to get some kind of workable events system for a2b3, something suitable that gets people to do their own data entry and that is mobile friendly.
My current set of how to keep up with what is going on in a mobile environment is using a Socialtext wiki in mobile mode, and a wiki calendar architecture with page names like
[2008 April 25]
[2008 April]
e.g. a wiki where there is a class of pages that are calendar pages. I suspect this is a personal exercise, much more so than a collective exercise, since I’ve tried this fully three times now and the pieces fall apart at some point in my own mind (never mind getting a bunch of people to try this).
I just linked here from Marnie Webb’s conversation on mostly the same topic at
http://ext337.org/article/are-specialized-tools-contributing-to-the-fractured-conversation
in some hope of unfracturing the conversation.