Scott Kuhl has a post that talks about some of the problems associated with a blog “main page” like here at GeeksWithBlogs.
There are other problems, though, when you subscribe to a main feed through an RSS reader. I subscribe to several Main Feeds, including blogs.msdn.com, weblogs.asp.net, and geekswithblogs.net.
Main Feeds are nice because:
- You can discover brand new bloggers with interesting content to subscribe to
- You can find the occasional interesting post by bloggers you don't subscribe to
- You've got something to read when your subscribed bloggers are a little quiet. I guess Scoble doesn't have this problem, with his 700 subscribed feeds :)
But there are a few problems:
- You get duplicate posts by bloggers interesting enough to subscribe to directly
- You can't eliminate posts by bloggers you know you don't want to read (foreign language posts, for example, or products you don't use or care about)
- Massive quanitities of posts of uncertain quality
- Massive quantities of near-duplicate posts when something interesting happens (“If you haven't heard already from 10,000 other bloggers, Microsoft just announced ...”)
I don't know if you could ever figure out a way to solve the last two of these, but if an aggregator had the ability to selectively unsubscribe to posts based on author within a feed, that would solve the first two issues.
I use OmeaReader by JetBrains as my aggregator, primarily because it is also a newsreader, and I don't want to use two separate apps. OmeaReader doesn't have this ability.
Does anyone know of an aggregator that has this ability? (Exclude posts from a feed based on author)
Do you subscribe to main feeds, or just to specific feeds from individual blogs?