I read Strange Attractor last week, and I have to say that many of my friends and co-workers aren’t afflicted with feed overload syndrome. Nope, they’re suffering from feed intimidation syndrome. They don’t know where to get started on the Internet and seem overwhelmed by the technology that’s out there. I don’t blame them. So, I wanted to turn Strange Attractor’s list of problems with the meta-feed concept into a few tips to help these folks build a purposeful starter set of feeds and hopefully make their Internet experience more useful.

Here are my thoughts:

  • Start with a list people or authors whose opinions you know and respect, and then check if these folks have blogs.
  • Subscribe to their feeds, if they have them.
  • In your aggregator, check out the feeds related to those sites. Your aggregator will suggest sites that are related to the one’s you’ve selected.
  • Next, check the public subscribers of your sites, and read their lists of feeds. Often, you’ll find someone who’s done the hard work of building a list of feeds on a particular topic. Use their work.
  • Track down suggested links on the sites you’ve subscribed to. People will cross-link in stories, but go back to the original sites and look at their blogrolls, etc.
  • If your original list of authors have furl or delicious links, vet them.
  • Live with the feeds you’ve found for a few days and then ruthlessly delete those that don’t add value to the topic you’re pursuing.
  • Also, delete feeds that only provide an echo chamber, but no real analysis of their own. You run into the danger of reading the same story or news item over and over.
  • Make a list of knowledge gaps and search technorati and feedburner to find feeds to fill those gaps.
  • Rinse and repeat.

Building a list of feeds is an iterative process of mixing and matching sites, reviewing and evaluating content, and spending time to track down quality. It’s a lot of work. However, the effort that you put into it is the difference between a deliberate approach to the tidal wave of information on the Internet versus surfing and then drowning in a sea of useless content.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. Anyone else have suggestions?