Information Overload

(Warning: I've been horribly sick all week, so I'm not sure how coherent this will be.)

Do RSS aggregators help or contribute too information overload?

The short answer is yes.

They help us to manage information. We can screen information so that the information we are most interested in comes to us. We don't have to go to each blog or news source separately which saves time. We also don't have to wade though a lot of irrelevant information to find the relevant information we want.

However, whenever I've been away for a few days and not checked my friends list on LJ (basically an aggregator of the journal posts of my 'LJ friends') I can have several pages of new posts to read. This can very quickly get overwhelming and lead to the feeling that one must check their blog readers every day or even multiple times a day to keep up. Because the information is coming to you there is more pressure to stay on top of it, rather then a more casual approach of checking a journal you enjoy when you have some free time.

RSS feeds can be very helpful or they can be overwhelming. I have found that the key is to be discerning. Instead of subscribing to any feed in which I have a passing interest, I try to only subscribe to feeds that I am strongly interested in or that I know are updated infrequently. Feeds that update multiple time a day, unless they are extremely relevant to the information I want, I probably wouldn't subscribe to but rather visit their site when I have the time to focus on what I want to get out of them. Other wise it is very easy for other smaller but possibly more important posts to get lost in all the clutter or for the reader to feel completely overloaded.