ReadWriteWeb gives us these awesome Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader.

7 tips:

  1. Oversubscribe

    2. - Read what you can and don’t worry about the rest. The chances that you’ll see something worthwhile in a feed are far, far higher if you’ve subscribed to it than they would have been if you hadn’t. Many people say they find relief knowing that with enough subscriptions, anything important that they missed will come up again later. Other people oversubscribe and then just read “watchlists” – searches for keywords inside their subscribed feeds. Some feed readers make this easy.

  2. Try a River of News View

    3. - Some feed readers require that you click through all of one feed’s items at a time. Others allow you to see whatever individual items are most recent, regardless of what source feed they came from. There’s no way to read every item in every feed you’ve subscribed to, so after reading what’s most important – try switching to what’s most recent!

  3. Use Multiple Services

    4. - Some feeds are really important and are best read outside of the bulky environment of a feed reader. Try starting a Netvibes, Pageflakes or iGoogle page for the feeds you want to be able to quickly check out throughout the day.

  4. Try Out a Desktop Reader

    5. - Desktop readers are faster and more responsive. Almost everything you need is stored locally on your hard drive so it’s faster than AJAX.
    - Local storage of the articles in your feeds means you can access posts that are no longer online, you can see the difference between originally published and current versions and you can read your feeds if you’re offline.

  5. Tag Items to Share

    6. - Sharing items helps make your feed reading more meaningful and thus easier to do. If you know that people have subscribed to your shared items feed, then it makes even more sense to open up that feed reader and continue supplying the fruits of your good taste.

  6. Learn about OPML

    7. - OPML, or Outline Processor Markup Language, is a really simple file format that’s the standard way to move bundles of RSS feeds around. :
    # Export your subscriptions from one feed reader in OPML format and import them into a different service in order to try out something new.
    # You can swap full or partial reading lists with friends.
    # You can send co-workers a collection of feeds for easy bulk import.

  7. Try Out Additional Services

    8. - The second best thing about RSS, after convenience, is its flexibility. There are so many different ways you can use RSS feeds :

    # AideRSS is my favorite RSS tool right now, it filters any feed to determine what the most popular items in the feed are. You can then subscribe to just the 20% of posts in a feed with the most comments, inbound links, etc. I do this for feeds on many topics when I’m not invested enough to read every item – I just read what a blogger’s readers thinks is most interesting.
    # Social bookmarking tool Ma.gnolia makes it really easy to make friends with interests similar to your own, then to subscribe to a feed of all the things your friends bookmark. That’s a high-quality feed to read.
    # Email to RSS lets you keep track of certain types of emails in a different application. I know I get enough email that I need a reminder about some of it. I created a filter in GMail, where each filter/label has its own RSS feed. Just subscribe to this URL in your feed reader https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/label/ but replace the word label with the name of the label you want to subscribe to.
    # Check out the most popular items tagged RSS in Del.icio.us – and consider subscribing to the feed from that page!

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