Social bookmarking sites and your favourite RSS feeds.

[Gilbo]

Does anyone use anything like de.liriou.us or Reader2? Do you have any comments you'd like to share regarding their usefulness?

Recently I've been trying to expand my internet horizons a little and find better sources of tech news in a variety of specific areas as well as satisfy some other interests. I've got an RSS aggregator (I use Liferea), but discovering new feeds that are worth putting up with by trial and error has been a laborious process --I'm with regards to Signal:Noise ratios-- so I've been thinking about registering on something like de.lirio.us lately in the hopes that it points me in some good directions. Wikipedia lists a small army of sites, which is more confusing than helpful to me. Does anyone have any general thoughts or recommedations?

Lastly, in the hope that someone finds it valuable or interesting, here's my list of RSS/Atom feeds of winnowed down to over the last year or so. I'd love to hear of feeds you guys make use of.
Bruce Schneier's weblog on security.
Paul Graham's essays.
Dansdata.
ArsTechnica.
Newsforge.
Linux Weekly News.
OpenBSD Journal.
The Inquirer.
Journals.Ars.
Staff.Ars.
ferringb's blog (Gentoo Dev).
KernelTrap.
OSNews (I might cut this soon S/N isn't great these days I find.).
Anonymous Usability Designer (Rarely active.).
Anandtech.
TechReport.
DPReview.
PhotoshopNews.
Ian Murdock's Weblog.
Grits for Breakfast.
Drugwar Rant.
NewScientist.

 

[Gilbo]

--I'm with regards to Signal:Noise ratios--

Means that I'm picky when it comes to signal to noise ratios. RSS feeds are supposed to save me time, not drown me in information.

 

[Mercutio]

I've looked into social bookmarking. It bothered me for some reason. Wasn't something I felt comfortable doing. Which probably just proves that I'm anti-social.

I make use of RSS feeds (I just use live bookmarks in Firefox) from slashdot.org, Google news, fark.com (always a good way to waste a little time!), boingboing.net, digg.com and wired.com.

 

[fb]

I only read the F1 feed from autosport-atlas.com.

 

[sechs]

Am I missing anything exciting with the RSS business?

 

[Gilbo]

RSS (and when I say that I include all RSS versions and their analog Atom) has made a lot of things much more convenient for me sechs. It's nice to have my news and information at my fingertips in one location. I used to waste a lot of time running from site to site to make sure I didn't miss anything that might be of interest to me. Now, monitoring chosen sites for things that interests me takes a fraction of the time, and I don't miss things that I want to read. Being able to search through a specific selection of sites' stories is nice too.

Honestly, it's one of few computer technologies that has genuinely, and completely made my life better, which says a lot. Not in a life-changing way of course, but in a small, noticeable one.

In the end, one thing that is important is that you have to be picky about feeds. I find it's best to get multiple feeds from narrower sites with high S/N. ArsTechnica is one of the few sites that publishes general tech news feeds that I trust enough to take advantage of. If you get drowned in too much information the benefits of syndication start to disappear very qiuckly. You can monitor much more information with RSS though, than you could with your browser and bookmarks.

I've just started trying out the new Google NewsReader. What I'm looking for is longterm archiving, excellent searchability, and effective prioritzation of stories according to what it manages to learn about me. Presently, I have no idea how long it archives feeds for, the search appears to be very good, and the prioritization is not ideal, but good enough that it is better than not having it. The prioritization should improve over time I suppose, but I wish they gave more insight into what the NewsReader tracks so I could help it along more successfully. My one initial complaint with it was that it was slow at points, but this appears to have gone away after a day. Caching or something I suppose.

If the Google NewsReader's prioritization gets good enough, my hope is that I'll be able to sign up for some higher volume feeds which have some information I'm very interested in but enough noise that the tradeoff, heretofore, hasn't been worth it. PlanetKDE and PlanetGnome or two feeds that I had to drop because I didn't want to take the time to sort through them enough for them to be worthwhile for me.