I’m an avid user of Google Reader to handle my two dozen or so feeds. Among my favorites are Boing Boing and CNet. However, I’m thinking of removing them from my list.

Why? They all publish too many stories to possibly keep up with. Which begs the question: how many updates per day is too many?

In the case of CNet, there have been days when they’ve published over 100 stories. My thesis is that this information overload results in an unused feed, making users drift away from your site.

For an RSS feed to be effective, 10 updates a day seems to be the magic number. This is opinion, not fact, but I would imagine that I’m not the only RSS consumer who feels that the sweet spot is somewhere south of a ten-spot.

This assumption is based upon the belief that a feed shouldn’t be a fire hose of information, but rather the delightful stream of mountain spring water that is the distilled information you care about. (Forgive me. I just can’t help myself sometimes.)

So what can be done if you’re developing a content rich site that will be updated dozens of times a day? My typical solution for clients is to provide a variety of granular feeds that filter the content such that feeds have no more than 10 updates a day.

Take, for example, Boing Boing’s iBag feed. What would be great is a set of specialty feeds that filter out, say, all stories on Steampunk, old scans of magazines, or Xeni’s long travelogues. What would be left are the few nuggets of info I actually care about.

Looking at one of my own sites, McKinneyNews.net, we offer a ton of RSS feeds. You can drill down by sport, school, writer, or any combination thereof. This reduces the total number of daily updates to a digestible number.

Another good example is Wired’s menu of choices. You can drill down by subject and author. They even allow you to create your own custom feed based on news you care about.

These examples share one thing in common: they let the reader scan and consume content they care about rapidly. This creates a stickiness that makes your site a part of your reader’s daily info diet, which is good for your client and good for your business.

Tags: boing boing, cnet, mckinneynews.net, rss feeds, wired

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Opinion, Recommendations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.