NetNewsWire has been my primary tool for reading news and RSS feeds for awhile now. That said, I never could figure out a good system to deal with streaming or high-volume news feeds given it is designed, as are most RSS readers, around an inbox paradigm. I must have subscribed and unsubscribed to high-volume feeds like TechCrunch or Mashable a half dozen times, only to give up when I saw the unread counts steadily go to double, or even triple digits.
Help came though from an unexpected source – Twitter. Once I actively started using Twitter, I realized it was a great tool for consuming streaming news whether it was CNN Breaking News, ESPN, or one of the aforementioned sources. News stories flow through your Twitter stream, you skim the headlines, detect news patterns as appropriate, and click through as something
catches your eye.
No unread items guilt, no inboxes to get to zero. A great system really.
That led me to move a lot of my favorite news feeds over to Twitter and so far it has worked out great. That said, I still have a number of feeds that I house in NetNewsWire. In the past, I have played with all sorts of models to organize my subscriptions from category-based to grouping them into daily, weekly, or must-read groups.
However, inspired by Twitter I recently made a big change.
I now have only three groups: ”Must Read”, “River of News”, and “Admin”. That’s it. What do they mean?
- “Must Read” are the feeds I never want to miss – that is a carry over from organization ideas past.
- “Admin” contains feeds that monitor different sites or services I work with.
- “River of News” – this is the big change. For those of you who follow Dave Winer, there is no secret about the name – it represents a model of streaming news as opposed to “inbox”-oriented news.
What I tried to do with this folder was create a “River of News” in NetNewsWire based on my experience digesting “streams” of news with Twitter. So here’s how it works:
- I no longer read “feeds” underneath the “River of News” folder. I just select the River of News parent folder and visually skim the whole stream.
- I moved the “Source” field in the news item listing to precede the title. This might seem really minor, but it mimics Twitter’s lead of the username before the tweet. I would have never done this before, but really like it.
- I then scan a whole page at a time and read articles as appropriate. Given NetNewsWire’s great support for keyboard shortcuts, I can do this without ever using the mouse.
The ideal model would be for me to be able to expire the news stream after a given amount of time (or number of articles), but despite the 300+ unread articles you see in the screen shot above (!), I have had a good experience in the couple of days I have been playing around with this.