Google Reader Needs Filters

In the past I switched feed readers quite often: Google Reader, FeedDemon, Bloglines, NetNewsWire,… Sometimes I even used multiple readers at the same time, switched back and forth between them. At the moment Google Reader is my feed reader of choice again while NetNewsWire is working as some kind of offline backup. If I was still on a PC FeedDemon replaced NetNewsWire, of course.

Why Google Reader?

The main reason for switching to Google Reader was the sharing option. Users can share interesting articles publicly, while others can subscribe to those shared articles and import them into their own feed reader. It’s a RSS feed after all, right? That’s great, actually. I see more interesting articles throughout the day without having to subscribe to even more blogs and news sources. Currently, I’m subscribed to 435 feeds anyway, if I got that right. I certainly don’t need much more subscriptions.

The Problem

As I mentioned above, it’s great to read interesting articles. Though being subscribed to more than 400 feeds means a lot of articles are marked unread when opening Google Reader again. If you – like me – can’t check your feed reader for several hours this is especially true. So some filters are required to cope with the vast number of unread articles because you don’t want to miss articles that are relevant to you, do you?

Currently, I’m testing a mix of theme based folders (sports, Apple, music) and folders based on the blog’s relevance to me, i.e. sorting blogs into a category like ‘must read’ which I want to check daily and two other categories which are less important, so it doesn’t matter if I miss them. This combination works quite well so far.

Shared Articles and Relevance

So where do those shared articles from other users fit into this scheme? Well, the good news is that Google Reader is summarizing them in the left sidebar.

This is nice. A list of articles handpicked by people I trust. Though this list can become quite long. Also it is natural that the same article is shared by various people sometimes.

List view of articles in Google Reader:

An individual article:

Could Google Reader sort that list by relevance? I mean if two or more people I follow share the same article it is probably relevant to me, isn’t it? It would be great if those articles were highlighted or summarized in a special folder.

Google Reader also doesn’t recognize every time that an article was already shared by someone else and I already marked it as read. I see it twice or even more often.

It was absolutely awesome if Google Reader recognized my interests and sorted articles according to them. Then folders were more or less obsolete. APML was an option, I guess.

Oh yeah, German blog netzwertig had an article on Google Reader as well today. It made me think about the topic a little bit.