For well over a year now, I have been using the RSS reader Snarfer. It has always been faithful to me and very easy to use, simple and low on resources. This was the case but I have been noticing that it now uses a lot of memory, a bit more CPU at times, it freezes, and crashes frequently. I am not sure if it is because I have too many feeds, and if that is the case, I should find a more fitting RSS reader and leave this one for the little chumps.

I am looking for a new RSS reader and am willing to try out ones that people recommend. I would like something low on system resources that is easy to use, has a similar layout to my current reader and is possibly more powerful and has the same, or more features. If anyone has any suggestions, please leave it in the comments. I hope that I can find another reader to love, just as much as I use to love Snarfer.

Everyday, there are many different ways I get news and information delivered to me. My RSS reader is the one that delivers the most information to me, fast and in an easy to read and process way. The thing is, after about a year, my RSS reader gets filled up with feeds and begins to become slow and packed with too many feeds. This makes reading my feeds unproductive and time consuming.

Today, I though it was time to prune my feeds down to a more manageable size. After about a year of collecting feeds, I had well over 100 feeds in my reader. I managed to cut that down to under 100 feeds. I ended up trimming about 20 to 30 feeds from my reader which makes it more compact and easier to proces than a massive amount of feeds.

I first went though looking and deleted any feeds I didn’t read anymore and feeds which hadn’t been updated in a while. I also deleted any feeds which had similar content to another feed. For example, a lot of tech feeds get the same information, at the same time. there is no point at getting the same story twice so I decided which one writes the best articles and kept that one. I also sorted all my feeds into folder to make them easier to read. Instead of having 20 in one, 10 in another and 60 in another, I split them into more manageable folder with 10 or so feeds in each.

Now my RSS reader is much happier, and so am I. I don’t get as many duplicate stories and articles in my reader that I don’t care about. It is much more efficient at doing its job. I think everyone who hasn’t had a clean out of their readers shoud take some time this month to sort it out and remove the rubbish from it. I managed to shave about 4kb off my OPML file which is great in my eyes. You should have a clean out too!

• Dirty OPML (16kb)
• Clean OPML (12kb)

 Veronica Belmont recently wrote an article on her blog about how she doesn’t like Tumblr. The reason behind it was because of people aggregating their feeds into it. I don’t think that it is enough for you to not like a service because there is a lot more too it than that. I personally think that its the worst feature that Tumblr has but I get over it because very few of the people I follow do import their feeds into it.

But she does have very good points about people aggregating their feeds into sites like Tumblr. I think people shouldn’t do it, especially on Tumblr. Why you may ask, well it is because I don’t want to see your links and such on your tumblelog. If I want to see what you are twittering about, I will follow you on that and/or subscribe to your feed there. Same applies to your pictures, if I wanted to see your pictures, I would be following you on Flickr and seeing you pictures along with everyone elses pictures. This is also the case for all the other services that you are part of.

If I want to see various content, I want to see them together as a group. All my friends tweets, photos, blog post ect. on their own. I don’t want to see the content mixed up. I am fine with having everyone pictures together in a single feed for me to go through. The problem also is that if you do that, I am going to end u seeing your content twice. I don’t want to see it twice because it wastes time. In saying that, if you have something that everyone must see, for example, a very nice shot you took and uploaded to Flickr, that would be acceptable, I just don’t want your whole feed with all your pictures on your tumblelog, or any other service.

If you do that, people are going to get annoyed and frustrated and stop following you and unsubscribe from the feed, so in the long run, you lose. This is a greater loss if you actually use the service for what it was intended, the imported content clutters your actual content and you end up with a mess that few people are following because of it. In saying that, I am sure it is acceptable for you to have a place to import your feeds in one place to give to a contact, or contacts, that don’t follow you everywhere and would still like to see what you do online.

It would be good if there was a service that could deliver that and that only, aggregating content, not creating it. I am sure there are services that do that an I don’t think Tumblr is one of them, even though it is possible. I think it was a mistake to ever put that feature in to be honest. Anyway, I think it is unfair also for someone to dislike a service for something a feature on the site, one that the minority would use. Tumblr is a wonderful service and is definitely my favorite one of 2007. Please keep your feeds of my Tumblr

About two hours ago, Apple’s Presentation would have ended. I have just woken up and don’t know where to go. There is going to be Apple information from the presentation everywhere on the internet. But where sold I go first to get all the information and pictures in a single, easy location so I don’t have to muck around sifting through information to get everything I want to know.

Digg will definitely have this in the top 10 dugg stories. Digg is one of the many bases online for Apple Fanboys and any big technology news is on there. Apple + New Product + Hype = Top Story! My guess would be that the story either links to Engadget, Gizmodo or Mac Rumors or all. If this is the case why not go to the original source first because I’m sure the information is spread across multiple posts.

I could go possibly go to Twitter, Pownce or Tumblr. Someone on there would have definitely linked to a website with a lot of information on it. My guess would be that it would link to the same article(s) as seen on Digg. The only problem is that there will be quite a few people with different links and I wouldn’t want to go to all the sites to find the exact same information on it so this method of getting all the information quickly might not be the best solution.

I could try the my RSS feeds because I know for a fact that there will be at least 5 different sources with information on the new iPods. The only problem is that this information will be mixed with other stuff so I would have to siff through my feeds. Also if I wanted to see any extra content, for example photo galleries, I would end up going to the site anyway to see these so why not just go to one at the start.

I guess I will just go straight to a website and have a look at the news. Now I have the problem of deciding which one would have the best content, whether its Gizmodo or maybe Mac Rumors of possibly Engadget, now thats a big decision. Well off I go. *crosses fingers for new iPods* :p

There are a few new features on Pownce. I don’t use Pownce much but I do read what people post on it. I generally don’t see any compelling reason to use these micro-blogging services. People use them for short messaging a wide amount of people but that is not something I have any reason to do, let alone have anything to say, therefore these services are somewhat useless to me.

One of the new features on Pownce is the showing of upcoming events on the right side of the page. First off, generally the event don’t have anything to do with me or are of interest. I don’t care about an event happening in America or Canada or any other international country. I don’t live anywhere near there and wouldn’t travel to those countries anytime soon so this new feature is irrelevant to me.

Another new feature was the automatic embedding of Videos and Pictures. In my opinion, this is what services like Tumblr and Soup do. This feature is more for blogging and mini-blogging services and not for the micro-blogging ones. They are moving into a field half way between mini and micro blogging by taking the best of both worlds and merging them together but not focusing greatly on these features to make it a hybrid type service.

The last new feature was linking of other web services. This is somewhat useful because now people can see links to the services I actually use, for example Digg, Flickr and Last.FM. You can also put your IM addresses and links to other websites, for example your personal blog. But this feature is not really original, just taking something that another service uses and taking a different angle.

I would only use these features if I had a way to connect to these site away from my computer. Some services offer this but they generally cost money, money I am not willing to spend on them. I still keep my eyes on the sites, reading what people are up to and interesting things they post. I read what my Pownce contacts have to say on the website and I also still read what people have to say on Twitter via the RSS feed. Am I still a user of these sites, even though I don’t contribute?

Pownce - http://pownce.com/yum9me
Twitter - http://twitter.com/yum9me