How Scoble Reads 622 Feeds a Day
Tim Ferriss has video interview of how the famous Robert Scoble reads such a large number of feeds on a daily basis using Google Reader. The keyboard shortcuts and “river of news” (which most news readers provide) make it easy to scan through so many feeds.
To catch Robert’s attention, he does a quick mental check: good headlines are a necessity and the content should be link heavy. Link density shows that research has been done and hopefully there is some analysis and an unique point of view. Images are helpful because the readers slow down to look at them. Sites like TechCrunch have gotten popular for including graphics in every post.It’s an interesting conversation of balance between reading lots of different bloggers and other blogs who aggregate and filter for their readers. In a way this is related to the new planet.ubuntu-us.org that has gone live recently. Right now it’s set up to read feeds from sites of approved LoCos, but should it take in blogs of community members of those LoCos who are not CC approved members yet? Does that open up a can of worms? What would happen if a post is made violating the Code of Conduct? Does opening up the planet create an administration nightmare? Or should non-members use other planets like ubuntuweblogs.org?
Is this a technical post about Robert Scoble and content in RSS feeds, or a political post about the new Ubuntu-US planet?
At any rate, here are the reasons why we made the decision to keep that planet to approved LoCo groups only. The reason is, http://www.ubuntuweblogs.org and http://planet.ubuntu.com cover the needs for Ubuntu members and nonmembers alike to aggregate their blogs, and receive decent traffic. If we allowed yet another planet for individuals, then we would run into duplicate content. The only way to avoid duplicate content would be to employ heavy moderation keeping the planet about US teams only. I think we can all agree that we’re grown-ups, and heavy moderation is just babysitting, which isn’t needed.
Another reason we chose the direction for the planet that we did, is because the US Teams Mentoring Project is about just that: US Teams, not individuals. Thus, if a team has a news site, where it publishes the latest events, meetings and happenings about the team, then the planet is the place to publish this content, thus, keeping other teams in the loop and know-how about ideas for their own team. The planet is for approved teams only, to give some motivation and desire to become an approved LoCo team.
If you have any questions about the decisions we made, I would love to discuss them with you in #ubuntu-us on Freenode.
Thanks.
I’m open to discussing team member use of the US Teams Planet but I think, as one of the administrators of said planet, that it does need some amount of regulation. If we can set some guidelines on use we could see about opening things up.
Aaron,
My post was definitely not meant to be political. These are just issues that a burgeoning community, like Ubutunu, needs to deal with and I’m sure you and Christer will do a great job managing it.