The problem with Main Feeds

Brad Corbin — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 21:25:00 GMT

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?

Finally starting my own blog...

Brad Corbin — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:10:00 GMT

Hello World!

I've been lurking around the blogosphere a little too long, and have a bad habit of posting long rambling discussions in other peoples' blogs. I guess I finally need a place to place my OWN rants and comments. I'll be making posts about:

.Net, mostly VB.Net and a little ASP.Net
MS CRM, I mean Microsoft Dynamics CRM
SalesLogix, I mean Sage SalesLogix CRM (another mid-market CRM product, a competitor to MS CRM)

and probably some other miscellaneous discussions of interesting stuff.

One of my primary goals is to have an archive for the problems and solutions I encounter every day. Hopefully my discussion will be interesting and helpful to some others as well.

Brad Corbin

Blogs and Blogging

The problem with Main Feeds

Finally starting my own blog...