UberNoggin

If you use Google Reader then you know that you can export all of your feeds in an .opml file but what’s the real point of being able to move your RSS archive from one computer to another when it’s always available on the net? To share it with your friends and coworkers, of course! Tomorrow I begin a new job as Director of Emerging Technologies at MediaSauce. Part of my preparation for the new job was to do a little feed maintenance to be sure that I’m getting all the latest news and info I need delivered directly to my morning weary eyes. Mark, my partner, is well a bit overly organized (read anal retentive) about his feeds and I knew that he was reading lots of blogs that I should be adding to my list so I asked him for his .opml file to quickly add his feeds to my already long list. He said “Sure!” and soon I was importing his feeds into my list.

Little did I know, but I was about to learn a whole lot more about Mark than just what he reads over his first cup of coffee in the morning. Now, get your mind out of the gutter. His list wasn’t full of porn or anything strange. What it was full of, however, were all these strange little tags: P1, P2, P3. I didn’t know what they were for. He explained that he reads so many blogs that it’s easy to eat up too much time reading articles that don’t really impact his day. His “P” scheme prioritizes his feeds via a tag and allows him to sort through to read the important ones or just the fun ones. Brilliant!

I also learned that he follows a lot of blogs of “ordinary” folks I had never heard of. We both read Warren Ellis, Tim O’Reilly, and even Violet Blue. But there on Mark’s list were about ten blogs of moms, photographers, undergrad classes, and lots of other unlikely candidates for a daily read. I asked him why and being a Wikipedia scholar he gave me the typical “collective intelligence guy” answer: “Everyone has something useful to say. I learn more from the insights of those people who aren’t inundated in the industry or academia some days than I do from the experts.”

So there you go, folks. Prioritize your readers, add some feeds that might surprise you, and don’t be afraid to share your .opml files. It’s a whole lot quicker to share one file than to ask people “Do you read….?” Or ” Did you see….?” If you share your feeds you’ll know they have.

Want to see what I read? Grab a copy of my Google Reader feed here.

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