Two weeks ago I looked up from my feed reader and realized I’d been checking feeds for an hour and 12 minutes, non-stop. I was at work. There was a lot to do. And I wasn’t finished.
“Enough,” I thought. “I have got to get a grip on this. But how?”
RSS feeds can make surfing the web a much more productive and less time consuming activity. But, as I’ve found, they can also control the time you spend online if you let them. At the start of this process, I subscribed to 305 feeds and would routinely see 500-800 different posts per day. I’ve spent the last two weeks wrapping my brain around how to manage my RSS feeds, my time or both to optimize my web browsing experience.
The facts are these:
- Paid newspaper subscriptions have been steadily declining by a 2-3 percent rate every six months since 2005 (Editor & Publisher)
- Several major daily newspapers including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami Herald and Dallas Morning News have experienced steeper declines in subscriptions in 2007. (Editor & Publisher)
- Viewership for evening news has decreased one million viewers per year for 25 straight years (Nielsen Media Research)
- 2007 featured the least-watched week in recorded history for the big four television networks (Associated Press)
As a result, the holiday is also a day of hope. Tomorrow I’ll hit the ground running with a renewed sense of optimism in just about every aspect of life. Sometimes, that optimism putters out and I renew it a year later. For instance, I’ve resolved to lose weight every year since I was a sophomore in high school. Some years, I’ve lost weight. The problem is that in all of those years, I’ve gained weight too.
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