For the past several years I have used a traditional RSS reader. Over time, and roughly in order, I’ve used SharpReader, RSS Bandit, Bloglines, FeedDemon, and Google Reader. Lately I’ve been seeing more talk amongst various tech folks about leveraging a widget-driven start page as a dashboard view of incoming information. As someone with about 350 feeds that I read in a River of News style, I wasn’t sure how a dashboard could work for me but the idea was intriguing.
Justin Kistner has posted recently about the usage of several tools which combine to provide a powerful market dashboard for the CMO of Jive Software. Justin also happens to be the guy behind Beer and Blog, so when this week’s topic was dashboards I decided to head down to the Lucky Lab yesterday afternoon to talk about information aggregation.
My first question was how one would have a useful information portal with 350 feeds, and the short answer is that you don’t. Using tools such as Yahoo Pipes and AideRSS, the feeds are combined, filtered, and sorted to bring the important information to the top. Justin showed some specific examples and now as I’m reading feeds in Google Reader tonight I’m looking at a lot of items that really are just wasted bits, sandwiched between the things I care about.
So… I’m going to build a dashboard. I’m going to attempt to put some thought into the process, so the first thing I’ll be doing is taking an inventory of my feeds, giving each one a rough category and priority so that I can start to visualize how many pages I’ll want, and how those pages might be arranged. Once I get things a bit organized, I’ll write another post here that talks about my plan.
I see that Justin has posted his notes from the meetup, if you want to read more about what sparked this project.
[tags]dashboards, netvibes, feeds, rss, yahoopipes, justinkistner, beerandblog[/tags]
