I have officially given up on RSS. Just checked my feeds in Opera – 13,766 unread posts. If ever I was in any doubt that RSS has become unworkable it was this.
I only subscribe to nine RSS feeds and it's only been just over a month that I last deleted several thousands unread posts. The problem is that because RSS feeds are automated there is tendency for publishers to throw everything they have into a feed.
The big media organisations have realised the overload and started producing a number of RSS feeds covering news, sport, technology etc etc but this doesn't cover the problem. The thing is I want some news, some sport, some technology. And I most definitely do not want *all* news, *all*sport…
And so I have stopped the feeds – I wonder how much space they're taking up on my computer. Perhaps this is why Opera is so slow of late.
What is needed if this potentially amazing technology is going to survive is a new spec that allows the user to give the supplier a set of preferences. Or – even better – a self-learning RSS feed where you tell it what stories you like, which you don't, so over time it only sends you the stories more likely to be of interest.
Until that point though, I've given up on RSS. I won't have been the first and I most definitely won't be the last.
