Last week, my intro to multimedia classes discussed RSS feeds, and why they were a good thing. I love RSS feeds for keeping up to date on matters at the intersection of technology, journalism and college media. A lot of people have started using Twitter as an alternative to RSS readers, but I don’t find that a good thing, necessarily. The real problem for me is the amount of information that come through the RSS reader in a day. I was amazed at how much content some of the blogs I follow was pumping out in a day, so I decided to try an experiment. I “bankrupted” my Google Reader yesterday (Monday, Jan. 30, 2012) at 4 p.m. Central Standard Time. There were no unread items.

It’s now 2:30 CST on Tuesday, and I just went in to see how many items were in the unread RSS inbox. As you can see, there are 276 unread items. And I don’t follow any traditional media outlets (NYT, Washington Post, etc.).

The main contributors to this RSS glut?

• TechCrunch (42 items)
• BoingBoing (40 items)
• GigaOm (32 items)
• PSFK (30 items)
• Lifehacker (26 items)

Five sites, 170 new items in less than 24 hours!

Now, granted there’s probably a lot of good information in some of those blog posts, but who can keep up? I’m sure most people don’t read all these firehoses of niche information, preferring to focus on one or two. But if you’re trying to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in a certain area, it’s not always an option.
It’s no wonder one of the more recent tech terms to become a buzzword is information overload.

I’m sure someone has a workable situation for this conundrum. I think one of the things we’ve created with the fast pace of the Internet is the need for constant content, some of which is little more than a picture and a blurb from another blog or a press release. And that’s not helping us get quality information, much less act upon the information we’re getting.

This isn’t specifically a college-media-related issue. But as journalists of the future, one of our college students’ key functions will still be to serve as trusted curators or information sherpas for people who don’t have time to follow all this content. And that means they will have to find strategies and tools to go where the information is and discover what’s important without having to spend hours in front of a screen sifting through stories.

Related articles

• Information overload? – Use of RSS web readers as content filters (marketing.yell.com)
• Value Of Curation Comes Identifying Patterns And Synthesizing Information Overload Into Practical Business Advice (waterwayrealty.wordpress.com)
• RSS Update: Not Dead, But On The Watch List (battellemedia.com)
• RSS feeds make comeback with tablets and apps (kevin.lexblog.com)

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As I started looking through the list, I realized there were a few of the sites on the list that are no longer updating. In fact, one: College Rag (which I wrote about in 2008), appears to have ceased to exist altogether. I didn’t link to their name, because it appears to have gone dormant, replaced by an ad site.

I don’t have so much of a problem with people who stop updating their personal web sites or blogs. People get new jobs, they decide they don’t have as much to say, or they want a break. That happens to all of us. But I do regret when sites go totally dark. It’s a classic case of link rot.

I’m trying out a WordPress plug-in (Broken Link Checker) to see if I can clean up some of the link rot that’s happened over the past 5 years. I’m also writing this as a reminder for any college media outlet with extensive online archives to occasionally check if your outbound links are still functioning.

As for the blogroll, I’ve reorganized things a bit. I realize that putting bloggers and journalism-related sites into neat little silos based on some descriptive term (industry, new media, academia, college media) didn’t always accurately describe the blogger or the content of the site. So now, I’ve put everything into three categories: Organizations, Others, and Fallow.

Fallow means a site that hasn’t been updated in a long time. These sites still have good information, but they’re not currently being updated frequently. Organizational links are self-explanatory – these are “corporate” sites, with a wealth of evergreen information put out by a journalism-related non-profit. Everyone else falls into the “others” category.

I would still encourage you to check out the sites on the list (it’s on the right, below the Twitter widget).

I’ve heard it said that site visitors don’t use blogrolls (lists of related sites) anymore. I wonder if that’s the case? I will certainly use them on occasion. At I think they are helpful for new visitors who might want to further explore the particular mindspace your site is trafficking in.

Related articles

• Blogrolls. Does anybody use them? (gypsyroxylee.wordpress.com)
• Svonk.com Promises the End of Dead Links on the Internet (prweb.com)

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It’s the middle of the summer, so there’s not much going on in the college media world other than people moving content management systems, putting out college editions and getting ready for fall. As such, expect light blogging the rest of this month.

For those who need something to read, I’d encourage you to check out the ongoing Guardian UK coverage of the News International phone hacking scandal as it spreads.

In tech geekery, the news recently has been about Google+. I started experimenting with it last week, and I’ll have some thoughts after a bit of experimentation. In the meantime, if you don’t have an invite yet, hit my e-mail – scmurley – at- gmail.com, and I’ll invite whoever I can.

Stay cool.

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You can read the article above, but I hope it comes through that I welcome the experimentation in new business models for college news, but don’t expect this particular experiment to be any sort of magic bullet.

I do think there will be a number of college newspapers looking at this experiment closely, and I hope the O’Collegian is open with the results.

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