Engadget's Ryan Block asks the question today. "Is Engadget’s daily wall-to-wall coverage too much of a good thing?" Are subscribers to the Engadget feed, who can anticipate upwards of 30 new stories a day, inundated by having too much to read, some of which might not find their fancy?The issue is a very real one for us on the bleeding edge of information consumption. For those of us RSS wonks who have upwards of 100 or so individual feeds, finding the time to read hundreds of posts on all topics can be a demanding task. I consistently scroll through 500 or so articles on Google Reader every weekday, and about half that number on the weekend. Engadget is one of the most prolific blogs, usurping even ESPN.com's main feed.
According to my Google Reader Trends, Engadget posted 28.3 items per day over the last 30 days. Of those 848 items, I read 100% of them. Only an aggregate newsfeed I developed for work was more busy, tagging me with new items 42.7 times a day. The other mega-feeds? ESPN.com with 26.8 items, TechMeme with 22.8, Slashdot with 20.4, Eschaton with 18.5, Talking Points Memo with 15.2, Daily Kos with 14.6, and Mashable with 14.4 posts daily.
Combined, those alone tally more than 200 posts a day, good for 40% of my reading. But in terms of quality over quantity, Engadget is among the very best. I've considered unsubscribing from Slashdot, which seems to lag Digg or Engadget these days. I actually did unsubscribe from Boing Boing a few weeks ago because the signal to noise ratio was too high. I've also considered reducing my political feeds like Eschaton and Talking Points Memo, which tend to be duplicates or feature too many "New Open Thread" type posts that don't add value to the RSS reader.
As Ryan asks what the solution is, I would argue that in Engadget's case, it's not to write less through reducing the amount of posts that are accepted. Instead, it's to better let readers know that reduced sets of feeds are available on specific topics. Engadget, like ESPN.com and other busy sites, offers the ability to subscribe to channels dedicated to Gaming, HDTV, Storage or Wireless, for example. Rather than get all 30 stories a day, the focused reader would get 2 to 10. It's not about reducing options, it's about being a smarter consumer.
I see the onus to be on the reader to better maintain their consumption of news than it is on the newsmaker to reduce their output. In the world of massive information, we as consumers should get ever more adept about how we get our news, and how we share it. So Ryan, don't worry about us being forced to read too much. Let us make the hard decisions, and you keep focused on bringing the news.