On June 12, 2009 I started a series called “Trimming in Public“. The goal was simple: get rid of RSS feeds that I don’t find useful anymore by going through my entire list of 293 feeds, 10 feeds at a time, per blog post. The tagline to the series was: “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash”. This is the final episode.
Becoming a better blogger
I’ve been blogging since November 2006 and a lot of people who read my work are also people who do what I for a living. Helping them know the industry better by sharing the sources I use benefits everyone in the news ecosystem. New news is posted to the internet faster and thanks to a widened breadth of knowledge, better articulated opinions and predictions can be formed.
Becoming a better reader
These days it is impossible to know everything, which is why I’m more than delighted to tell my readers about the other websites I consume. Websites that help me do what I do day in and day out. This website, IntoMobile, doesn’t function in a bubble. It’s a part of the internet. We all learn from each other. If one day you’re tired of reading my dark sided potty mouth humour, then feel free to check out one of the 100+ websites I recommend.
I also know that a lot of you are insecure. I don’t have the link to the exact report, but it goes something along the lines of: “people read more about a product after they purchase it, rather than before, so that they can comfort themselves with the information that they’ve made the right decision”. It’s why I get retweeted a billion times when I say I love or hate a phone; people strangely seem to respect my opinion. If I can help you find more people who make you feel good about your purchase, then I’m helping you feel better, and I hope you keep on coming back here for your daily dose of mobile tech news.
Helping me take out the trash
This is just plain obvious. I started out with 293 RSS feeds and I’m ending with only 101. That’s less than half. I needed to do this for my sanity, my health, and to let my mind have more time to absorb and process new information, rather than constantly consuming it, bit by bit, hour after hour. It’s been a hellish ride to get to the finish. Some months I would crank out an episode a day, other months I would crank out an episode biweekly. I was not disciplined enough to keep a consistent schedule, and there was something called “summer” that got in the way of productivity. Putting those excuses behind me now, I would like to present to you the final 6 RSS feeds:
- WOM World – Nokia: Nokia is paying a couple of people in the UK a hell of a lot of money to send mobile phones to up and coming bloggers all over the world. WOM World isn’t serving the press per say, they’re helping the little guy. I used to get things from them all the time, but that’s now stopped since IntoMobile is technically a “popular” destination. Some may say there are ethical issues with this, that Nokia is just pumping free hardware into the ecosystem, devices that these bloggers would have never purchased on their own, just so they can write a review on their blogs. These reviews would then turn up high on Google if one were to type “Nokia N97 Mini Review” into the search box. As long as said bloggers are disclosing that they’ve been given the hardware to review for a few months, then everything is OK, right? I can’t begin to tell you how many emails I’ve received over the past few years from people saying: “Hey, I just started a blog, how do I get free hardware to review?” Can you trust the opinion of these bloggers? Do they write what they write so that they can keep on getting free hardware? I’m a cynical asshole so these are the thoughts that swirl though my mind. Decision: Unsubscribe.
- World Wide Web Foundation: An organization founded by Tim Berners-Lee, this website documents what’s going on with the effort to bring internet to the people of Africa. It’s updated fairly infrequently, and the content is rather lame. There are far better people covering what’s going on in Africa right now, such as AfriGadget. Why Africa? They’re the next big thing after Asia. Pick up a copy of The Economist and you’ll see that Africa is where China is outsourcing their difficult labor, while at the same time investing a lot of money. The word “Africa” has some fairly negative connotations such as AIDS, poverty, and tribal warfare, but the continent is so vast that you can’t just slap a label on it and talk about a Pan-African economy. The blunt truth of the matter is that I stopped caring about Africa after the recession hit. Watching how China is going to lift themselves out of the shit storm caused by Americans wanting to own a 4,000 square foot home with a 67 inch HDTV in every room is going to be too interesting to pay any attention to Africa. Maybe people will care once U2 writes a song about them or something. Decision: Unsubscribe.
- WSJ.com: Photo Journal: Unlike The Big Picture, which posts a set of images every week about a certain topic, The Wall Street Journal simply takes photos they think are “cool” and creates a daily blog post. It’s distracting to be looking at photos from all over the world, about 10+ events, since there is no cohesion. Decision: Scatter brained photo selection = unsubscribe.
- xkcd.com: Are you living under a rock or something? Decision: One of the best online comics. Ever.
- Yahoo! News Search Results for Nokia: When “Nokia” appears in a news article indexed by Yahoo!, it appears in this RSS feed. Google does a far, FAR better job than Yahoo! ever will when it comes to indexing news. Decision: Unsubscribe.
- Yamato Thinking: In case I haven’t made it clear in previous episodes, I’m a huge Lenovo Thinkpad fan. To me they’re the best designed and most dependable pieces of computing equipment ever to be created. This is a Lenovo blog covering several aspects of the design of the legendary Thinkpad. This very blog post was composed on a T61 that I’ve had for nearly 2 years now. I refuse to upgrade since 2.2 GHz, 4 GB of RAM and a brand spanking new 500 GB hard drive run Windows 7 just fine.
For those who want to see the original list of my 293 RSS feeds then go ahead and grab this OPML file.
And to the others who want the new, trimmed, list of 101 RSS feeds, here is the OPML file you should download.
I hope you enjoyed this, I’m going to be starting a new series tomorrow (or the day after) so stay tuned!