The discussion around blog syndication moves on from Atom vs. RSS and into hopefully more constructive territory, namely, now that we have syndication what more can we do with it?

Rich Gordon on PoynterOnline is unimpressed with the current crop of RSS feed readers which fail to make his life any easier. He points to Lance Arthur on glassdog who has a great rant on what's wrong with feed readers.

The main point that Lance makes is that feed readers are so basic that they fail to allow us to refine the way in which we use RSS:

Feed readers have at their disposal near infinite processing power, well-differentiated and -defined data and� do nothing with them. You can sort your feed items by date. Exciting!

Features he'd like to see implemented revolve mainly around filtering content so that he can "put what I'm actually going to care about at the top of the list and the discussions about which syndication protocol is best at the bottom". This is something I agree with wholeheartedly.

A few weeks ago, after some time away from blog reading, I imported the Headshift OPML into Bloglines and suddenly found myself with some 15,000 unread posts. I could really have done then with a way of filtering out the interesting posts and discarding the dross, rather than having to scan through everything myself.

Les Orchard on 0xDECAFBAD also pitches in with his views on the matter, and a pithy description of the situation I find myself in:

I'm adding between 2-3 feeds to my list [of 550 feeds] daily, so I can see myself approaching 1000 eventually. But I'm starting to hesitate at adding one more feed now. Even with my current streamlined multi-pass skimming process, I�m starting to see diminishing returns. I breeze past screen loads of chaff that I'll never view, but it still bogs me down. I can only think that people with twice the subscriptions as I either have more free time, or have a better mousetrap.

As Les says, the answer is not to cut down on feeds but to find a way of organising all this data more efficiently. At the moment, feed readers are like a library with no indexing, no Dewey Decimal System, and no labels on the shelves. You may like every single book in the library, but if you're looking for information about a specific topic the lack of organisation is really going to slow you down.

In the comments of both Les' and Lance's posts people recommend Findory Blogory as a way of discovering new-to-you, relevant feeds, but I don't think discovery is really the problem. Kinja was created as a way for people to locate blogs about subjects that interest them, and the new version of Bloglines does a great job of blog recommendations - it even managed to recommend one of my own blogs to me, as well as coping admirably with finding Welsh language blogs.

But blog location is nowhere near the problem that blog feed management is. There are blogs everywhere - what we need is a way of singling out individual posts that meet some set of criteria, whether specified by us or created automatically from observations of our feed reading behaviour. Otherwise, we risk RSS becoming a tool for information overload rather than knowledge sharing.

(Via Neil McIntosh on Complete Tosh.)