My Tools: FeedDemon

FeedDemon is my feed reader of choice and has been for a very long time now. I loved FeedDemon so much that I actually paid for it when it wasn’t free.

It’s now free which just adds to the goodness.

Steve commented a few days ago, when talking about email overload that:

If anything I find I suffer much more from RSS overload than Email overload, but RSS readers are designed from the get go to help people cope

I would agree. My feed list is several hundred long, most of them active, but FeedDemon allows me to scan through them in a way that I regularly find remarkable. If I had as many email as feed posts I wouldn’t cope, but I do cope and cope quite well.

Feeds have revolutionised the way that I interact with the web – I rarely go to any web site to see what’s new. I used to go around a set of sites regularly, it was frustrating and annoying and took up loads of time. Feeds give me the changes, FeedDemon presents them in a way that allows me to scan through them quickly.

My favourite key combination within FeedDemon is ctrl+d which takes you to the next feed with unread items. On one of my keyboards the “d” key is starting to look a little warn which shows how often I use it.

My normal working habit is to scan through quickly flagging things within FeedDemon that I am going to read soon and I tag things into del.icio.us (using  FeedDemon) that I want to remember for some indeterminate point in the future. I tend to do this early in my working day. If I’ve got some time to read I’ll do it there and then, if I haven’t I’ll close FeedDemon down, leaving it closed until I have time to do some reading.

If I forget to close FeedDemon I find myself going back to it to see if there is anything interesting happening in the world – this becomes a huge time drain.

One of my biggest friends in FeedDemon is the “Panic Button”.

On returning to my feeds after my holiday last week I hit the panic button and marked a load of older feeds read. As the dialogue says – this isn’t email after all. I’ve recently introduced a few, non-technical, friends to FeedDemon and feeds in general and they are really struggling with this concept. We still have a long way to go before we really understand the social impacts of some of this technology. People have learnt how to scan a newspaper over hundreds of years, and I think that it’s a similar skill, we just need to help them realise that.

I use FeedDemon on a number of devices, depending on where I am sitting. The NewsGator synchronisation engine is great for keeping the feed list and read/unread status aligned. It’s not always perfect, but it’s close enough for me to be able to switch between machines with little impact.