Sep 282009

“ From your 202 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,055 items, starred 28 items, shared 30 items, and emailed 0 items “ . This is what Google Reader trends say about me. What this means to me is that from what I read I consider valuable and worthy to be shared less than 1% of all the posts.

From the 202 subscriptions most of the noise comes from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Scobleizer’s Twitter Favorites, my own alltop page feed and my own readtwit feed.

Subscription Posts per day Percentage read
Digg 134.5 3%
Reddit 72.6 4%
Delicious 46.8 5%
Scobleizer’s 68.7 8%
My alltop 149.7 3%
My readtwit 22.4 5%

What annoys me most are the low percentages that I get from Readtwit and Alltop. I would have thought that if I choose my domains of interest (websites on alltop) and people I follow ( on twitter ) carefully I woud get a noise to signal ratio a lot bigger. It doesn’t seem to be the case.

From all the websites (services) that are trying to improve the situation (noise to signal ratio) it seems to me that only Postrank and Feedly are having a little bit of success (I do use these 2 services on a daily basis). The others such as Lazyfeed, Daily Perfect are still far behind.

I see a possible solution to this mess and I will try to describe it below.

I am pretty sure that Postrank filtration algorithm can be tweaked on a per person basis, but I am almost sure Postrank doesn’t have the resources right now to support this.

I am sure that the aggregation (clustering) technology that Google is using on the News site can be used on the Google Reader but I am also sure that Google has no interest in doing that since their scope is to have their ads displayed on as many pages as possible.

I imagine that Feedly which takes into account at the moment what I shared on Reader and what I twit in the last 30 days to decide what it’s more important to me could base their recommendations also on what my friends on Google Reader network and on Twitter promote.

Now if somehow someone could integrate all these 3 technologies together I know I would pay that company a small amount each week in exchange for a much better signal to noise ratio.

Some time late last year I’ve realized I do not have enough time to browse through all the information available to me in my Google Reader setup. I was getting anything from 500 to 1000 posts each day. I had a hierarchy of folders based on my interests, folders like gadgets, blogs, Romania, politics, news and so on. I was planning to use the AideRSS Firefox extension but until December 2008 they had performance problems. The long story short, I was getting overwhelmed with the amount of information available and I wasn’t able to actually process the information and derive knowledge out of it.
So I’ve took a step back and over a few days of browsing I’ve changed the folders to Daily, Weekly, Monthly, SomeTime, Podcasts . I put in each folders the feeds based on my reading habits and the importance of getting the information in a time. For the Weekly, Monthly, Sometime the AideRSS is displaying only the great posts. Now I am going to Google Reader only once per day in the evening during the working days for at most 30 minutes and read only the Daily folder. At weekend I spend maybe 1 hour reading the Weekly and Daily folder, and once a month I will spend another extra 2 hours for reading the Monthly and SomeTime folders.
For the moment the only issue I have is the fact that for the the Digg and Reddit feed, the AideRSS extension is not working properly. And these 2 feeds are having the worst signal to noise ratio from all the feeds I read.

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