Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1, I explained what RSS is and how to use it. Please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.
Check out Episode 14 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:
Episode 13 was published on July 20, 2009. After 2 months that involved a lot of partying, a lot of resting, a move from the Detroit of Finland (Tampere) to the capital city of Helsinki, I’m back to trim my list of the remaining 198 RSS feeds. Sorry for the delay, but I got caught up in the spirit of the summer. While the sun was shining from 4 in the morning to 3 in the morning the next day, it was hard to sit on my ass behind a glowing LCD. Now, sadly, fall is upon us in the Nordics. Wet leaves make the ground slippery, it is constantly raining, and it is no longer t-shirt and shorts weather. Enough bitching and moaning about the weather, I’m starting to sound British!
- My (and your) E61: A blog about the Nokia E61, my first S60 smartphone and the device that eventually led me to start up “Ring Nokia” and then get hired here at IntoMobile. It has not been updated in over 2 years. Decision: Obsolete blog, deleted, will not count towards today’s list of 10 feeds.
- My Nokia Blog: Written by Jay, also known as Jose_R.A.M on Howard Forums, he is a Nokia addict. Just like I am. He actually has original content too thanks to Nokia’s social media team who supply him with handsets to review and fly him to events around the world. Sadly, and I really regret saying this since I’ve met the guy in real life, I don’t want to read yet another Nokia blog. My decision would be a bit different if the blog decided to publish a full RSS feed, but instead it is only partial, and that makes my daily reading slower. Decision: I still have a hard on for Nokia, but it isn’t as hard as it was when I was a younger man. Recommended if you love Nokia, but not for me. Unsubscribe.
- My Tweeple: I can’t share the URL of this RSS feed with you since it is unique and has sensitive information, but I can tell you about the service. MicroPlaza is a service that tries to do a lot of things, even I’m not familiar with the full feature list, but one thing they do very well is store the URLs of the links people you follow on Twitter have shared with you. Say I follow 100 people, and half of those people post one link a day, I would then get 50 new RSS items with the links that they’ve shared. The service doesn’t work very well since the list of people I follow is always changing. I constantly follow and unfollow people on a weekly basis. MicroPlaza has not updated their system and are showing me links from people who I no longer follow. That isn’t cool. There is a service that does something similar to this, it was recently covered on ReadWriteWeb, and is called ReadTwit. I have not tried it yet, so I can’t recommend it, but I plan on giving it a go once I finish “Trimming in Public”. Decision: The service no longer does what it should be doing. Unsubscribe.
- My-Symbian.com S60 3rd Edition: Someone a lot older than me will have to double check this, but I think My-Symbian is the only Symbian focused website on the internet that is older than All About Symbian. I met the owner in Spain a few years ago, and I’m kicking myself in the ass for not remembering his name. He used to be a hell of a lot more active than he is now, and I miss his detailed reviews. I was reading this blog back when there was only 3 or 4 websites dedicated to Nokia and Symbian, but now they’re a dime a dozen. I guess that kind of competitive pressure got to him, since I don’t see content coming out of My-Symbian too often anymore. It’s a shame really. Decision: Unsubscribe.
- MyPhoneRocks dot com: Dead RSS feed, dead site. Decision: Unsubscribe because it no longer exists. Will not count towards today’s list of 10.
- News for Nokia Corporation (ADR) – Google Finance: Analysts, stock traders, people in the financial industry, more often than not they’re better than bloggers. While a blogger will read a story and think about whether or not he should put in the effort to re-write it and put it on his site so he can get a few thousand hits and rake in $10 from Google AdSense, people in the financial industry have thousands of dollars, sometimes more, riding on every bit of news that comes out about a company. Google Finance does a crazy awesome job at covering Nokia news, and I recommend you use this tool to cover your favorite company, your favorite competitor, or any company you have an interest in. Decision: Highly valuable RSS feed.
- The feed above, it is in my RSS reader twice. This is due to the fact that Google Finance started out as an ATOM only service, but then added RSS support later. Deleting the duplicate, it will not count towards today’s list of 10.
- News From Symbian Smart Phones World: Symbian-Freak has an external reputation as a site dedicated to hard core Symbian hackers and fanbois, and an untalked about, private reputation, as one who sucks at linking to their sources and even disables the ability to highlight text from their website to prevent copy and pasting. I don’t read the site anymore. Decision: Unsubscribe.
- NFOrce NFOs – PC App ISOs: Quick lesson on piracy: Internet pirates, just like real world pirates, each have their own name. When they release a piece of pirated software, or film/audio/book/whatever on the internet it is always accompanied by something called an NFO file. NFOrce is an online library of NFO files. What do NFO files contain? If it is software, they usually contain a serial number or instructions on how to crack the copy protection. If it is a video, it usually tells you more information about the film, such as the source of the rip, the settings used to encode the film, and whether or not subtitles are available and in what language. I used to pirate software, not because I needed it, but because I was a collector. What an idiot I used to be. Today I just pirate when I want to see or hear something. I’ll even pirate the same thing over and over again because I’m too lazy to back it up to an external hard drive. Decision: I’m still a pirate, but instead of being a Captain, I’m now the guy who sits below the deck and peels potatoes. Unsubscribe.
- NOK – Seeking Alpha: Look at what I said for number 6, Google Finance’s feed. Seeking Alpha is just another aggregator. One is enough. Decision: Unsubscribe.
- Nokia – Beta Labs: Oh how times have changed. I remember there used to be a period in my life when I stayed up and night and tried to find new software for my new smartphone to see what capabilities I could add to it, but today my mobile phone is a critical piece of equipment and I have a bullet proof workflow that I do not want to fuck up. It takes a lot for me to want to play with beta software, and to be honest Nokia Beta Labs has not pumped out anything interesting in a long, long, long time. If they do come out with something cool, I’m sure my friends are going to talk about it, or Engadget is going to write about it. Decision: Beta software isn’t cool anymore, beta services are. Unsubscribe.
- Nokia – Google News: Love it or hate it, Google News is one hell of an aggregator for online news. This is an RSS feed that spits out every article, from every publication Google News tracks, that contains the word Nokia. The Google Finance RSS feed (scroll up and read number 6) is enough, I don’t need to read this feed too. Decision: Unsubscribe.
- Nokia Beta Labs blog: Number 11 was a link to an RSS feed that spits out announcements about new software, this is an RSS feed that spits about new blog posts by the Beta Labs team. Unsubscribing from this too and not counting it towards today’s list of 10.
- Nokia Conversations – All Posts: Nokia’s official corporate blog. Most of the time the content is bland and boring and very sterile, but they do have scoops (obviously) on announced devices. Decision: Ehhh, why not, I’ll keep on reading this.
And with that, 1600+ words later, I hope to bring you “Trimming in Public” on a more consistent basis. I’m down to 187 RSS feeds by the way!