Reaching For Lucidity Productions

Lately there has been a trend where the tech elite have been abandoning RSS for the more immediate information gathering of Twitter and Friendfeed. The thinking goes that they follow the people they are interested in and thus through sharing, they get all the news and information they need.

I have never bought into that. I love RSS. I love how it is targeted and customizable. Still, I have been getting a bit annoyed lately. Try to follow the top web design blogs through RSS and you will see where the aggravation comes from. I get the same stories, shared by all the blogs, several times over. I have to deal with this to get to the sites’ original content.

Another thing that drives me nuts is that a lot of the blogs I follow have started a cycle of saying the same thing over and over in different ways. Again, something that has to be dealt with to get to the actual new thoughts and ideas from the blog authors.

I am not giving up my RSS in Google Reader, nor am I quitting Twitter or Friendfeed, but I have found a way to get information that works better for me. It is called Lazyfeed.

What I love about Lazyfeed is it is somewhere between Friendfeed and Google Reader, without the headaches of either. Plus, you don’t follow people or blogs, but subjects. The feed is in realtime and offers a constant flow of information in all of your topics. It is really fun. Here is my topic list. (Well most, Denver Broncos, Tony Stewart, and Jeff Gordon got cut off in the screen grab)

As of right now, those are my real interests. Each time a subject is updated, it moves to the top of the list. Clicking on it brings you to the feed. The page looks like this, interests to the left, the feed to the right.

The coolest thing is that since this pulls information from all over the web related to interests, a lot of what hits the stream is new and fresh. I don’t get information just from those that I subscribe to or follow. There is always something good to read. Also, since there is always new items coming down the feed, it is alright to let it go for a bit. I don’t feel the need to catch everything.

Another interesting fact I have come to realize is that a lot of the people I follow actually don’t put out a lot of content that I am interested in. A lot of the people I follow are the thought leaders we are “supposed to follow,” the folks that we should listen to. When reading a feed based solely on my interests, these folks never filter in. Go figure, eh?

This way of getting information may not be for everyone, but if you like discovering new information based on actual interests rather than people and blogs that feed information, give it a shot. It is at http://lazyfeed.com

Cheers,

Eban