Turns out all the information-overload doomsday prophecies were correct. I spend a lot of my time getting “updates” on RSS feeds that add no value to my day. Again I repeat the plea: someone find a way to actually cut the crap out of it. Netflix: offer an RSS feed of the new releases that actually had some theatrical release. (I will no longer read that seasons of TV shows can now be placed in my queue.) I don’t need all Slashdot news, just the really important Slashdot news. Give me an option. I don’t need it hand filtered and gift-wrapped, I just need a whole lot less of it.

So, subscribed feeds: you’re on alert. I’m unsubbing anything that I don’t find vital. Nobody needs to track that much information. At least, I don’t.

I just found the most amazing thing on Bloglines. If you’ve got Google News search results, or iTunes RSS feeds, or even just a perfectionist blogger in your feed lists, you know that Bloglines is popping new results in your face every time something changes. There’s a setting, it turns out, for each feed, for “updated items”. The default is “Treat as new”, which is very wrong. The best way to handle it, except for feeds where the updates are really useful (like, let’s say, iTunes charts, where you want to know when new Pussycat Dolls goes from 8 to 6, and then to 2, and then to the number 1 spot), is to select “Ignore”.

You might laugh (esp. if you’re not using Bloglines, because this distinction will seem especially petty, or if you really like Pussycat Dolls, and then your laughter is the nervous laughter of acknowledgement), but this was getting to be a serious problem. 37 news sites might carry the same AP story, but any time any of them twiddles a headline or corrects the punctuation, the whole Google search pops to the top of your notifications. I went so far as to unsubscribe from a few feeds, because the blog authors would touch an entry twice an hour for two days. They probably didn’t even know they were sending new notificiations to everyone, but that’s the state we’re in with RSS at the moment.

And if you’re not using Bloglines, get an account today, for the love of god. Stop clicking on your bookmarks to see if sites have changed. Totally 1998.

You know what would be great?  A breaking news RSS feed.  Like, only the real important stuff, when that happens.

I read a lot of news, but mostly because I think something important might have happened, and since it didn’t, I read the story about the waterskiing squirrel.  I think an "important" event happens maybe once a week in this country, but if three big stories are happening the same day, that’s cool.  Ping me three times.  If nothing happens for a month, that’s fine, too. 

While I’ve heard the phrase "24-hour news cycle" to refer to the relatively new practice of going too far in-depth on matters that most people find trivial (because cable’s got all that time to fill, and they are absolutely forbidden to stop talking), doesn’t it really date back to the practice of putting a newspaper out every day, and having to fill that just as full? 

So why is news still tied to a "today’s big story" paradigm, even when, on lots of days, there is no big story?

The best compromise I’ve found so far is CNN’s breaking news email, which I’m subscribed to from one of my Bloglines addresses.  Still, though, shouldn’t there be a news feed that doesn’t push 10 stories an hour?  Is that weird to want?

Google’s been busy, busy, busy this week.  The most significant release was Google Talk, which is a pretty ho-hum chat client.  I haven’t used it’s Skype-like features, but I do appreciate the fact that multiple machines can be logged into the same Google Talk account, and that new messages are delivered to all logged in clients.  That’s an important feature to anyone who uses more than one machine (and there are a lot of us).

Second on the list of importance, I think, is the fact that you can now invite yourself to Gmail.  They’ll send an authorization code to any cell phone.  So the beta is pretty much over.

I ignored the new Google Desktop, just because I couldn’t really remember anything that I really liked about the first version.  Yeah, it searches your files, but I’ve got AppRocket for that, and I love it.  I didn’t really want my personal results comingled with my Google results, anyway: I wasn’t sure what to expect when I clicked, and I don’t like that.

But I saw that they’d added Outlook search, which is exactly what I’ve been loving about Gmail and angry about in my current office Outlook situation.  (In brief: I saw an email in the past few days about the office fridge being cleaned out, and then a bunch of stuff from the fridge appeared in my mini-fridge, and I wanted to check that fridge-cleaning mail, but I couldn’t remember who sent it or what the subject line was.) 

But the sidebar is the easiest win for this new version.  Let’s just go through what I like about it.

1. Internet-savvy panels include displaying photos from RSS feeds (goodbye Konfabulator widget), tiny weather (goodbye Konfabulator widget), tiny stocks (it’s okay, Konfabulator), and a tiny mail reader (that integrates Outlook and Gmail… if you’re into that).
2. A modified RSS reader automatically rips RSS feeds from the pages you visit, and puts together a "best of" based on what you visit most often.  This could be nothing short of the missing link in RSS feeds.  Everyone could use RSS, but few are ever going to go through the trouble of learning which sites have it, which don’t, and subscribing to the feeds that would minimize their information overload.  This app does it for you… automatically… correctly.  It’s smart.  It’s almost creepy, but it’s really okay once you get used to it.
3. An internet best-of panel, which just ranks the pages you visit most often.  Again, something that’s just cruising in the background, ready to help… I like it.

This may not topple the intercontinental communications infrastructure as we know it (like Google Talk might, if they can work those deals with VoIP providers and get real phone numbers hooked in, like Skype), but putting more information at my fingertips (and getting me to uninstall half of my Konfabulator widgets) is notable, too. 

Well, another week’s almost in the bag, and of course, I have some RSS trivia for the 0 people (and counting) that care about that kind of thing.

If you have an RSS reader and are reading this site via it, you’ll want to point yourselves to my FeedBurner feed.  FeedBurner is sort of an all-signing, all-dancing RSS service, but it does splice together my del.icio.us and Flickr feeds, so you wouldn’t have to manage three of them if you just wanted the latest Dan evidence at all times.

In addition, it takes hints from my entries and can convert attached MP3 files to enclosures for extra-strength podcasting. 

Oh, I should also mention that dnord.com is officially DNSed here now, so the old site is shriveling and dying as we speak.  I moved some of the content over (Theme K, pretty much), but I did make a copy in case anything else should be thought important over the next few weeks.

One of my favorite columns, Jeffrey Wells’s Hollywood Elsewhere, got hacked, reconsidered everything, and has settled on Movable Type for a CMS.  While that’s great for him (he’ll have more luck publishing on his scheduled days, I’m hoping), it’s great for me, too: he’s got an RSS feed now, which I’ve slapped into Bloglines and am now checking on a daily basis.

It’s pretty much come down to that: if you’ve got RSS, I read what you write three times a day, and if you don’t, I’ll probably check you once a week or less.