RSS Feeds

In my last post, I mentioned that I subscribe to over 1000 feeds--I don't know the precise number, but I know that, at one point, it was over 1000 and quite likely it is below 1000 now after extensive purging sessions. Despite this, reading RSS posts doesn't actually take that much of my time; at worst, I lose an hour of my day, but I can say that each day that I learn a lot of new things.

A reader was wondering if I could share my OPML file. Sure, but first I would like to clean out and categorize my feeds first. It's flattering that someone would think that my collection is somehow special.

The problem with using other people's feeds is that they often contain a personalized selection of feeds that you may not particularly care about, such as blogs from friends, political blogs, and blogs in a foriegn language that you don't speak. That said, most of my feeds I have found through Robert Scoble, who freely shares out his OPML. I have also picked up feeds from sites that list the most popular feeds.

Subscribing to aggregators like weblogs.asp.net is extremely efficient, since the number of posters is automatically expanded without any intervention. I also subscribe to newspaper feeds, NYTime, WSJ, other newspapers in technologies. I keep an eye on non-Windows platforms, politics, entrepreneurship, and law. One cool RSS feed every blogger should have is one provided by Technorati that produces an automatically listing of outside blogs that link back to the blogger's site.

I periodically check my favorite websites for RSS feeds; just recently, I add RSS feeds for generation5.org and kurzweilai.com, two sites that discuss AI. By the way, if anyone knows of a tool or site that automatically converts HTML sites or blogs into RSS, leave a comment.

Comments

[Taka]

By "converting an HTML site into RSS", I take it you mean scraping:

http://awasu.com/downloads/ThirdParty/WebScrape

BTW, you might want to check your blog settings. When I previewed this post, my (textual) link had been automatically converted to a real link. But when I went to post, I was told that "this blog does not allow HTML comments" :-)

[Tom Mertens]

Roy Osherove (http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove) has something that might help you at http://royo.is-a-geek.com/SiteFeeder/.