Monday 14 January 2008

A request for Google Reader developers

I've just read the new #xkcd signal-to-noise ratio proposal to sort out their problems with a large community size in IRC.

I have a similar problem with a signal-to-noise ratio in Google Reader (which I highly recommend you should be using to read this blog). Lets have a look at my reader stats:

From your 161 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 9,368 items, starred 10 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.
Ugh. That means I'm reading approximately 300 items per day, of which 0.3 of per day which I find worthwhile enough to keep for later and at a guess 30 of which per day were actually worthwhile reading.

Now, I'd like to label some reader items as noise. The quickest way I can think of doing it is by link inspection. If a reader item has a link in it that points to the same link as another reader item, label one of them as noise - say the newest one. Then hide all noisy items by default (not just list view - hide them completely).

If I star an item, show me a list of all items that were 'noisy' which share common links - under the starred item in the starred item view only.

That should cut down on the massive duplication of posts which seem to cloud the blogsphere. Yes it's great that Darth Vader and Yoda are appearing in Soul Caliber IV. But I only need to know about that once - if I'm really interested, I'll star it.

I'm sure there'll be some tuning required for old reader items - but that'll be a good performance saving. Let's say 7 days is old enough. Or 30. Or some dynamic value based on how many items I end up getting.

Anyone else using an RSS reader with a feature like this?

1 comment:

Gareth LovesTha Pye said...

that sounds like a fantastic feature.