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18Dec/062

The pros and cons of RSS feeds and blogs (feature requests for Google Reader)

It was a busy weekend and I didn't keep up on my RSS feed reading. Monday's are typically very busy as well, so here I am, Monday night, catching up on all that's happened in the online world via my RSS feeds. Now, I realize that bloggers are trying to generate/keep readers and revenue by posting often, but it's amazing how many blogs cover the same exact stories. Thankfully, Google Reader makes it easy to "skim," but still.

I hope Google has the following in store for its Google Reader service:

  • Search past/present RSS feeds you've subscribed to. I can't believe how many times I start reading, get distracted, close my browser, and wish I could find the feed again. I honestly don't pay any attention to which blogs I'm reading from -- once I've subscribed, as far as I'm concerned it's something I'm interested in and pay little attention to it. With the RSS feed list topping 100 blogs, it's almost impossible to remember all of them anyway. So, a searchable feed list of my subscribed-to feeds would be great, thanks.
  • Mark individual posts as unread. I like to refer to feeds later and don't want to mark everything as "read." RSS feeds are great for skimming, but reading with more comprehension or wanting to post comments later on is something I like to do -- but I don't want to keep a list of unread posts in my del.icio.us account. I really don't have another way to keep track of them...once they're "read," they're gone forever (hence the searchable options; see above bullet point).
  • Consolidate posts that are similar in context. Kind of like Gmail organizes threads/conversations by subject, but group blog posts in a similar fashion. This is probably largely beyond the scope of the reader, but hey, it's Google. They should be able to figure out how to make this a reality. It sure would save me a lot of time. :D   This might also encourage more unique content than simply regurgitating articles/news found on other sites.
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Posted by Eric Long

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