My new RSS reader: the browser

Recently I’ve completely changed the way I take in news over the web.  I was inspired by a Slate article called “Kill your RSS reader”.  It described the exact problem I was having: my RSS reader had become another email inbox.  I had come to dread seeing a bunch of new posts every day that I left compelled to read.  For a while, I stopped going to Google Reader entirely, as I knew it was a futile process to keep up with the endless flow of news.

That’s why the Slate article resonated with me when it described a completely different process.  Forget about the traditional feedreader entirely, and just go with browser bookmarks.  What a novel, yet old school idea.

The simplest way to do it (which I’ve chosen to do) is to create bookmark folders that I add to my bookmark toolbar (I use Safari, but just about every browser has one).  One nice feature that Safari offers are “auto-click” folders, which will open all bookmarked sites with one click, each in their own tab.

When reading through the sites, if a link looks interesting, I open it in a new tab and keep going.  In most browsers, a middle click will open the link in a new tab, but remain in the current one.

For now I only have two bookmark folders: one for sites that I want to visit multiple times a day and see each post, and the other for sites that I’m OK with visiting once a day or less.  In the future I might try adding other folders like “fun” or “development”.

While this process is great for sites like Engadget that post lots of the content throughout the day, I’ve found that I still prefer Google Reader for blogs that post less frequently, but whose content is important to me.  This tends to be from bloggers like Fred Wilson, Robert Scoble, and Dave Winer.  But with the larger feeds removed, going through Google Reader is much quicker, and I don’t feel like I need to read every new post lest I miss important news.

Besides the obvious benefit of easier, less stressful feed reading, I’ve found that this process provides a number of other benefits as well:

1. By visitng sites directly, you actually get to see their designs.  While Google Reader’s bare-bones design helps focus on the words themselves, there’s something nice about experiencing different look-and-feels while reading.
2. Comments: in many cases a blog post is only the beginning of a conversation that continues in the comments, but when trying to scan through as many unread items as possible, clicking through to read comments wasn’t a luxury that I could afford.  But when a post is already open in its own tab, it’s simple to scroll down and look through its comments.
3. I’ve actually found it even easier to discover posts that interest me.  A lot of popular blogs organize their pages to showcase popular or important content.  For example, though Engadget still puts out a lot of posts, their site does a good job hightlighting breaking news, featured stories, and popular posts.  This is something I missed when only experiencing the RSS feeds.

While some have decried the death of RSS in light of social media sites Twitter and FriendFeed, I still find it important to experience sites directly.  In this way, I’m not only getting content from these streams, but helping to give back as well by discovering content on my own.  I just think the process of doing this had become a bit too much of a chore.

Firefox photo courtesy of flickr user garrett.