Drowning in Google Reader, I paddle back to Delicious

The Internet chatter these days is all about the realtime Web, which I think is an illusion and a misnomer.

Tech gurus muse about how Twitter has replaced RSS, how Google and blogs are so one-week-ago, and how realtime messages have moved from the stadium tunnels of email and message boards to the playing field, where even Oprah and CNN are now mere spectators.

But like email and message boards, Twitter also speaks to us from the past. It’s not instantaneous. The latest tweets you can read were typed 30 seconds or a minute ago — sometimes 20 or 30 minutes ago, if Twitter is really bogged down. None of this new stuff beats Alexander Graham Bell’s 1875 telephone for sheer immediacy.

All the news

No, it’s not simply now that people are after. We want totality. What we want is a dashboard or control panel or start page that allows us to monitor our entire personal universe second-by-second.

Instead of taking one call at a time, or receiving the latest interjections from 20 or 30 people in a chat room, we can now follow 600 or 2,000 on Twitter. We can mix Washington political insiders with Chicago foodies, California musicians, and Australian blogging experts — all the latest information.

However, as with fat and salt, what we want is not always what is best for us.

Wired

I am the type of news and information junkie in which this desire is really a sickness. While the rest of my hemisphere sleeps, I have the BBC or World News Now in one ear.

For me, the idea of using Google Reader as my Mission Control seemed conceptually appealing. To make it aesthetically appealing as well, I tried first Feedly and then Helvetireader.

I subscribed to foodie feeds, friends’ blogs, media critics, tech news, political pundits, and music reviews. I subscribed — I kid you not — to all of the “most-read” items at Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com, ChicagoTribune.com, and LATimes.com. I subscribed to a number of local news feeds, a feat made especially difficult by the fact that JournalTimes.com will often re-feed the same story six or eight different times, each new one breaking the links for all previous instances.

So there it all was, in one place: A single panel into which was channeled all of the news that matters, in order, and each item with its own “share” button allowing me to give my own special blessing to the most worthy ones.

No satisfaction

Except that it wasn’t all in there. Very often, upon the recommendation of others outside of Google Reader, I would find a worthy item that I wanted to share, but I was not subscribed to its feed — if indeed it had a feed that I could find at all. This resulted in me subscribing to entire magazines that I may never look at again.

The fact is, there is simply way too much information flowing, and you will drown if you try to take it all in. Spend five or six hours concentrating on a project for a client — or visiting family, or dividing backyard perennials, or sleeping — and you’re so far downstream that no amount of flailing can get you caught up. Sure, you can go ahead and “delete all,” but in that click you give up control, so then why bother using Google Reader at all?

Letting go

I figured the way to sanity and serenity might be through accepting that I really don’t need to know every single thing that Drew Peterson or Robert Scoble is up to. A rich and satisfying life requires not only the stream but also the ocean. Humans need some depth and profundity — epic novels and in-depth analysis, not just tweets and polls. Dialing down one flow to increase the other is as sensible as adjusting the temperature when showering. Ironically, letting go can put you back in control.

In Google Reader, I’m getting out of the rushing rapids of breaking news, whether from Washington or the Silicon Valley or Hollywood. I am keeping only the feeds from sources like the blogs of friends, who do not publish dozens and dozens of items daily. This way, Google Reader will be useful once again for its ability to catch important posts I might otherwise have missed in each day’s heavy current.

I will no longer attempt to harness the whole stream. I will merely surf the Web as time permits, visiting my favorite news sites, spotting something via FriendFeed or Twitter now and then, and letting the rest just go by.

Digg this!

Still, my ego needs to bless and approve things, and I want to maintain an organized list of these special items for my own reference, and the benefit of friends, and family, and the world at large.

I have used Digg on occasion to give something a thumbs-up, but submitting a new item to Digg can be very time-consuming, and approving an already-dugg article means accepting someone else’s title and description. Plus, Digg’s categorization scheme is ridiculously limited, and its membership is intensely political. Digging almost seems to be a full-time occupation for some users.

Clean is Delicious

Instead, I have gone back to Delicious, which I had used more regularly before Google Reader. Delicious is clean and delightfully clever. Its tagging system is infinitely flexible. You can go back and edit any item at any time. There’s a popularity measure, but it’s not over-hyped. I can post a handy linkroll on every page of my blog, and it will update instantly when I add a new item. Anyone at all can see my bookmarks or subscribe to them via RSS — even in Google Reader! If I wanted to, I could also keep particular items private.

The real deal-maker, though, is the Delicious Bookmark Add-on for Firefox. The original version of this tool was buggy and awkward. Now, it’s as sleek and easy as can be. I just hit the Tag Button, fill out the simple popup form, and voila! I have blessed that item into my linkroll, my FriendFeed and my Facebook stream all at once. There’s no subscribing to anything, no checking for duplicates, no CAPTCHA challenge, no nonsense.

I feel much better now, without that flood of articles building in my reader. Rather than treading water, I’m back to surfing and browsing the Web.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll even stop and read a book.

(“Watching The River Flow” by Bob Dylan, from the album Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II.)