Alex Payne — Fever and the Future of Feed Readers
http://al3x.net/2009/07/18/fever-and-the-future-of-feed-readers.html

Fine writing from al3x on the role of feed readers, inexplicably intermixed with a review of Fever.

Feed readers need more intelligence, for certain. The "editorial" aspect, whether it be professional editors or your friends, still carries more weight than computers.

Is this ever exactly the post I needed to read right now as I survey my intimidatingly overstuffed Google Reader page. (I currently subscribe to around a hundred feeds, but some of them are very high volume.)

Today, at least in the web-tech echo chamber, feed reading is quickly falling out of fashion. Too many sites producing too many feeds of dubious quality means information overload, and a creeping sense of obligation to keep up with a torrent of questionably relevant content. Some have gone back to checking a handful of bookmarked sites, as we did in the early days of the web. Others rely on social aggregation sites like Reddit, Digg, and Hacker News to show them what’s worth reading. Both strategies are highly manual and, to me, distressingly unoptimized.

Today, at least in the web-tech echo chamber, feed reading is quickly falling out of fashion. Too many sites producing too many feeds of dubious quality means information overload, and a creeping sense of obligation to keep up with a torrent of questionably relevant content.