Besides changing how information is communicated online, RSS is changing the rate by which information flows, and no, that doesn't mean less- it means more. Much more. Thankfully, there are great tools being created that will help you to manage this increase without losing your mind. (I'll spend most of this newsletter endorsing one in particular, Google Reader.) But more than just adopting new tools, we're going to have to adapt and learn some new skills to filter and organize all this content.

The most important skill is learning how to skim. Once you start subscribing to RSS feeds, you will have more information available to you then you ever imagined. Because there is so much, it's likely that much of it won't be relevant to you. Unfortunately, you won't know one way or another unless you start sifting through it. Good skimming means that you can quickly scan content and determine if it is relevant to you. Then, you can either decide to read it more closely, file it away for future reference, or maybe even share it with a friend. Since information is going to keep coming, you're either going to "sink or skim."

As you're getting the hang of skimming through the articles you receive, you should be actively adding new subscriptions as well. There will definitely be a limit to how many you can handle, but if you're skimming helps you to evaluate whether an article is relevant to you, you'll probably find that your subscription list will fluctuate. I've found that my overall list tends to top off at around 110 subscriptions. That may seem like a huge number, but only a portion of those subscriptions are actively delivering content to my reader. Some subscriptions update as often as 15 or more times a day, while others may update on an average of once or even less. When one of my subscriptions updates very often but rarely with information that is relevant to me, I'll unsubscribe. After all, at that point, the feed is more or less spam to me. That's one of the benefits of RSS over email, with RSS you always control the intake of your reader, while with email you're at the mercy of the undependable unsubscribe function. Learning when to unsubscribe is a critical skill that will help you keep your head above the RSS water.

One last point about skimming: Some people who value reading will probably be initially disturbed by the notion of skimming as a means of staying informed, especially when it comes to content that is professionally relevant. I can totally understand that, and if you want my philosophical take on this, read my blog post from February, 2008 titled It's All About Skimming.   next >