Robert Scoble and RSS feeds

Uncategorized on May 1st, 2008 2 Comments

I have spoken about information overload in couple of other posts. Robert Scoble’s RSS feed page has the following note on it:

I’m a tech geek blogger who reads hundreds of feeds every night from around the tech world. I pick the best items for you from about 800 feeds and try to get interviews with the most interesting people in the technology world.

Scanning 800 feeds seems like a LOT! In addition to all the near real-time twittering that Scoble has to do! This got me thinking about what is the variance of sources in his shared items. I am not sure if there is a Google RSS feed API, but it will be an interesting project for someone to look at the variance of sources in the shared items on a statistical basis. Given the finite bandwidth of human processing, my guess is that there would be low variance in sources on a daily basis. Perhaps one coping mechanism would be to look at a different bunch of sources everyday so that they fall in rotation over a few weeks. Of course, the problem here is that technology moves fast and information gets old very quickly.

How do you cope with this overload?

  • http://blog.yuvisense.net Yuvi

    I did it already(http://blog.yuvisense.net/2007/01/05/statbot-analysing-scobles-link-blog/)! But, I didn’t look at variance, maybe I should.. Soon…

  • http://searchyogi.wordpress.com/ searchyogi

    Thanks Yuvi. The analysis looks great.