eMedia Daily

How Many RSS Articles Are Too Many?

RSS is touted as the best thing since sliced bread for keeping up with information on the ‘net. Its easy to make sure you see the latest content from your favorite sites and blogs, without visiting every site every day. With the increased usership of pages like iGoogle and MyYahoo, and the widgets that display RSS feeds there, it seems as if RSS is here to stay.

But, how many feeds are too many?

I have a subscription to one site which offers a number of useful tips and hints for managing in our technology-driven lives without suffering from information overload. The problem is this: once I subscribed to their RSS feed, I started suffering from information overload from them. In 4 days (which includes a weekend), they delivered 68 stories. About 1/3 of them may be of interest to me - but at this point I’m ready to throw up my hands and mark them all as read, hoping that I don’t miss some tidbit that really would have helped me out today.

For prolific sites and bloggers like the one mentioned above, if you’d like to help maintain the sanity of your RSS subscribers, set up separate RSS feeds for your primary topic areas. I know that I would rather (and so would most other marketers who understand “targeting”) subscribe to 2 or 3 feeds from one site and get highly relevant content than one feed with too many posts. Especially when too many of those don’t apply to me.