A bit over a year ago, I switched from Google Reader to Feedly. I have a troubled history with newsreaders: I tend to not use them, partly because I don’t really read blogs. But I used Google Reader for some time, and then Feedly. I really like Feedly. Really. (Plus, it saved 4 months of posts for CTTS after the dropped database disaster.)
All this to say that for many months, I have not really opened Feedly, and I feel kind of sad/bad about it. Twitter and Tumblr are my main sources of “new information”, and I’d love to find a way to use Feedly in a way that works for me. But it just doesn’t seem to happen.
A couple of weeks back, I saw this tweet from Ewan:
He says that he has sorted his feeds into “30 must-read-daily RSS feeds, with the other 2000 sitting behind as personal search engine”.
Whee! For some time now, I’ve been convinced that the future lies with allowing search in subsets of the web. There’s too much stuff out there, right? Also, in this era of partial attention (which I don’t consider to be a bad thing, in the “keeping a distracted eye on” sense), you often end up trying to “refind” something you know you’ve seen (but where?) — just like I had to dig out Ewan’s tweet ten days after I’d seen it in passing.
That’s why I like Lijit, for example (I’ve put the search box back here on CTTS, by the way): it allows me or my readers to do a search on “my stuff”, including CTTS, Digital Crumble, Twitter, del.icio.us… Sometimes I know I’ve said something, but I can’t for the life of me remember where (see this? having to search your own words…)
Feedly is pretty good at allowing you to search all the stuff you’ve subscribed to:
It offers a mix of a little bit of generally popular stuff with “your sources”. I like that. So, I like Ewan’s idea of feed subscription as “add this to my search sources” rather than “oooh, I’m going to read this every day”.
I have to say I’m interested in hearing about how you use Feedly or Google Reader (particularly the social aspects) if you’re not a “religious-daily” newsreader enthusiast. There has to be something between “keeping up with my feeds” and “never opening my feedreader”.
I use Google Reader once a week, mainly on my mobile, in train, metro etc.
I tried to get into the habit of searching my feeds but it didn’t really work. I think you really need a lot of them to get relevant results.
The idea to have search results pulled from your Google Reader feeds when you are logged, appearing at the top of the google results, sounds interesting.
At the top of my Google results at the moment I use a greasemonkey script showing results from Twitter searches. I find myself clicking more and more on those links instead of Google’s.
And as a sidenote this article has some good tips about how to integrate Google Reader in other environements. Such as GMail’s sidebar. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/google-reader-tools-tips/