The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss - Latest Comments in How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Arun — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:48:15 -0000

I usually dont take this kind of personal branding and hero worship seriously. Reading 600+ RSS feeds is not much to be heaved about. I manage 150 RSS feeds, 200 domain content, visit a thousand web sites each day and answer forum posts and blog comments. I know many people who do more than me. While that is admirable, it is not that only Scoble has this so-called :"talent"

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Usenet Nut — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:26:14 -0000

Thanks a few interesting points there some good pointers for handling a large amount of internet data

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

trademark registration — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:15:36 -0000

Very interesting post. It's great to know how a true professional manages RSS feeds. A great video for those barely starting out subscribing to RSS feeds.

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

trademark registration — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:13:34 -0000

This is a very impressive post. Interesting to see how professional RSS-subscribers do things. This is extremely informative for those of us starting to use RSS feeds.

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

anon — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 07:15:22 -0000

Can we have the transcript of the interview please?

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Mark Riffey — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:27:12 -0000

Tim,

thanks for the interview, definitely some great takeaways there.

One thing of note: Id turn off the little popup comment feature on the videos. All it does is give the negative nellies a way to distract from your message. Leave that to VH-1:)

Mark

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

tddpirate — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 07:41:14 -0000

How about publicizing a text transcript of the interview, for the benefit of the hearing impaired?

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

gaurav — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:52:48 -0000

its to go through this page.....

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Kevin Johnson — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:46:26 -0000

Tim,
I heard a recording of a call via Robin Robins regarding your new book and I thank you for challenging me to rethink the way I conduct my daily life. I have ordered your book tonight. I also have signed up for Google Reader and I want to thank you for this interview with Robert.
Kevin

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Robert Scoble — Tue, 29 May 2007 03:15:52 -0000

Jonah: YOU shouldn't read 622 feeds. You should only read one. One that's already been filtered to just the good stuff. I thought that was pretty well communicated by Tim and me.

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

jonah — Tue, 29 May 2007 01:10:57 -0000

The real question is why is he reading all those feeds?

You, the author of Winning By Intimidation and many others have said, "Don't be an information junkie."

So why encourage people to read 622 news feeds?

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Tim Ferriss — Sun, 20 May 2007 22:46:25 -0000

Hi All,

I'm really sorry for the lag with Viddler. Though I compressed the video to less than 100MB, it was over 10 minutes and couldn't be uploaded to YouTube. If you have any other suggestions, my ears are wide open. I would use the impressive Stage 6 (stage6.divx.com), but I'm lazy and don't want to convert to DivX format each time. Alternatives?

Jim, I would love to share the outsourcing teams that I use, but here's the problem: they'd get overwhelmed and my work would suffer! Right now, my teams are mostly small (5-10), filtered and selected on Elance. Even GetFriday, which has done great work for me, is getting snowed under with work since their mentions in the book. The price of success! Be careful what you ask for ;)

Good luck!

Tim

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Jim Schafer — Sun, 20 May 2007 13:43:14 -0000

Tim -- another great post -- I really like your thinking. Could you possibly share the vendor that handles your calls from India/China? I want to start using someone like that and want to reach out to several vendor possibilities for quotes. Thanks and best of luck -- keep up the creative ideas -- they are great!

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Rob Stokes — Sun, 20 May 2007 13:10:44 -0000

Seems like a sweet vid Tim but I just can't watch it from down here in the 3rd world. I've been trying for the past week with no luck. The problem is that your video player won't allow me to load the whole video and then watch it from the beginning - it has to stream. This means that with our TERRIBLE South African bandwidth, this vid only plays in 1 second sound bytes every 20 seconds or so... pretty unusable.
Do you perhaps have a line where i could download the video?

Dig your blog.
Rob

Oh and PS, I think I track more feeds than Robert and couldn't do it without my custom FeedDemon config ;)

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Beeler Van Orman — Fri, 18 May 2007 15:25:17 -0000

Tim -

I just finished reading your book yesterday. Well done, very inspiring and motivational. It's given me some good idea's for the time that lays ahead. Thanks for writing this, it was very positive reading your work. Keep the influence coming.

Beeler Van Orman

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Brian Heys — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:36:45 -0000

I couldn't help but notice Scoble has a copy of 'Founders At Work' by Jessica Livingston on his desk. That's a cool book. I'm eating it up at the moment, and loving every minute.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the Silicon Valley startup culture.

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

shokk — Fri, 18 May 2007 11:14:11 -0000

If your job is reading blogs, then it becomes easier to dedicate a morning to reading blogs. I find that Google Reader is just too darn slow for scanning headlines, and frankly if the headline doesn't grab you, it proabaly wasn't interesting. Besides, there are so many memes that are reblogged, that if you don't catch it in one blog, another will surely have a grabber headline that gets you into the story. That said, there are so many things that are reblogged that you HAVE to scan headlines to get past it all. To process feeds quickly, scanning headlines is the way to go, not looking at bodies of articles.

I use a reader like MonkeyChow ( http://www.shokk.com/blog/a... ) on my own server (LAMP) so that I don't have to rely on Google's erratic feed updating. It also features search, a river of news view and allows you to reblog things into your own RSS feed and share your OPML for the whole bunch or a tagged group. You can also "star" stuff to bookmark it for later. Most options are use configurable to suit your taste. As for keyboard use for viewing the page, Page Up and Page Down work really well! I'm going through 200 feeds, but can cut through to the good stuff right away. A lot of it is feeds for software releases that I might need to update at home or on the work network and which do not update frequently. But some of them are prolific bloggers that spray content all day long.

Anyway, the old way of doing this stuff was through mailing lists, and just the portion of my feeds that involve keeping up to date with technology would be totally out of control if I were to continue with that. RSS is perfectly suited for the one-way broadcast that the web was become these days. Thank goodness for RSS in making my day more efficient.

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Jauder Ho — Fri, 18 May 2007 02:59:04 -0000

I actually read much the same way. I've always been able to scan fairly quickly so that definitely helps. I too use Google Reader although it would be nice if out the box, the window dressing consumes less real estate (I know about the various plugins) and if there was a nice way to split personal and work feeds.

So the read sequence is as follows (using GReader and Firefox):

1. Open GReader.
2. Scan through articles using 'j' or 'k'.
3. Interesting articles get opened in a seperate tab via 'v'
4. Things I want to keep track of get the star. This can happen either as I scan the article ('s')and already know it's a keeper or I'll leave the article unread ('m') if it's a maybe and go back to star the article if I decide to after reading it in its entirety.

This lets me minimize the amount of time taken to read and I average 100-400 articles a day this way (calculated via trends).

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Sean — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:34:52 -0000

For me things like PopUrls are the best solution. I've even considered doing a PopUrls clone solely for personal use with the feeds I like. It's perfect because I can log on, click on a few interesting things, and log off.

I find RSS feeds to be overwhelming as well. My job isn't to blog like Scoble. By the time everything else is done even an hour digging through feeds is a pain. I don't mind missing a few little things here and there, so with a PopUrls-esque solution I'm only seeing the last 20 bits of any feed and it doesn't pile up in an RSS inbox. Just having that little reminder that there's hundreds of unread items makes me feel buried, and 95% of it is destined for deletion anyway.

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Christian Tietze — Thu, 17 May 2007 19:08:24 -0000

I personally really like this kind of content. Although you don't blog that much every week, mixing in a video like this spices your posts up a lot.
Hmm... realizing where current technology is leading to (I never thought about videos or multimedia on the web a lot) I just can't help but smile :) What world of possibilities we live in!

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Thu, 17 May 2007 18:36:00 -0000

I'd love to view this (and I'm enjoying the site as a whole - great articles!), but unfortunately

a) the site's laggy as hell for me, and the video's stopping every 10 seconds.

b) The viewer that Viddler uses seems not to cache the video once it's downloaded, so I can't do my normal YouTube "fix" of letting the video run through once, jerkily, in the background, and then playing it once it's fully downloaded. If I try that with Viddler, it just starts buffering again from the point I rewind to - and so I can't watch the video at all without it stuttering.

I know you can't do anything about a), which may well be my local connection anyway. But b) is a bit of a problem...

Sorry my first post's a complaint, but the video looks really interesting!

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Chris — Thu, 17 May 2007 15:55:06 -0000

Mastering the Low-Information Diet

After reading Timâ€™s book I just started this week my new low-information diet cold turkey. I set up a virtual newsstand with the new feature, iGoogle (itâ€™s now my start up page). I have set up a quick summary page of RSS feeds, del.icio.us feeds and newspaper feeds. I can browse the headlines in less than 30 seconds. iGoogle makes it real easy to setup and do. If I want to read it later, I just del.icio.us it and read it on my â€œfree day.â€?

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Russell — Thu, 17 May 2007 14:58:22 -0000

enjoyed the video... interesting to see someone in the process of processing all that information, but get a wide angle lens on that camera for up close shots...

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Mark — Thu, 17 May 2007 14:30:33 -0000

I know he's using Google Reader's "share" button to add items to his link blog, but I wish you would've discussed how he organizes the ideas he gets when he sees an interesting post. How's he logging his ideas? What (if any) cool hacks is he using to start posting and linking based on what he's read. That sort of thing.

The first part of the interview (imprinting, etc.) was really interesting though. Glad you did it.

Re: How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning

Markus Merz — Thu, 17 May 2007 11:54:59 -0000

May I recommend BlogBridge as my preferred RSS reader for such masses of feeds.