RSS overload?

Perhaps everybody needs a holiday? First we learn that super-blogger Robert Scoble reads 400+ RSS feeds RSS every morning. Then we read that he's cutting back and exercising more. Another prominent blogger trimming his feeds is Steve Rubel. Can you get too much of a good thing? Most people seem to be saying yes (though Stowe Boyd is contrarian).

Scoble reckons the problem is Continuous Partial Attention, a concept advanced by Linda Stone. To quote the latter via Nat Torkington's blog:

"With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges. Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we're connected. To be busy and to be connected is to be alive." (see also her jot site)

Doing this for a while energises (the excitement of the hunt perhaps) but we're not designed to do it 24x7. It's stressful. Multi-tasking is also apparently unproductive and Lifehacker helps a little with Dropcloth to shade out all but the uppermost application.

Of course, email is a major culprit but RSS brings its own pressures and is increasingly acquiring some of the less attractive features of email, most notably unwanted adverts. You can focus a little by cutting back the number of feeds and filtering using Yahoo Pipes and its brethren.

Ultimately we may have to resort to third-party tools to assist such as myFeedz that adapt to our feed-reading behaviour. Particls goes one step further by offering to put high priority feeds in a ticker (not good for a small laptop) or even popups. If RSS feeds continue to escalate (and Rubel thinks they might crash) this may help if used with the necessary discretion.

If you have the willpower, the answer for email productivity may be to check the inbox just twice a day, once just before lunch and then an hour before hometime. I guess the same applies to your urgent feeds.

Aggregating RSS feeds in dabbleDb (probably pre-processed in Yahoo) has the nice side-effect of allowing you to control the frequency of distribution: every hour, day (a good choice for most feeds), week or month. The notion of channels that deliver at different frequencies is an attractive way of moderating RSS overload.