We will never be able to read everything. The question is: will I spend my time allotted for newsreading by reading the most important things, or will I randomly read important and unimportant things. The real problem is the lack of importance information in the RSS protocol. As a feed creator, no matter how many items I publish each day, people will be unhappy - some want more, some less.
Somebody has to choose which news elements are more important than other elments in a feed. And the only entity to do that is a human. We can outsource it to all users (like Google Reader does with its "like" button and the "magic" view, but this only works for very popular feeds in practice). We could let a third party do it (basically an editor. This makes for complicated 3-way protocol, plus this editor probably wants to get paid). Or we could ask the feed creator to give each item an importance value (1-100 or so). The feed creator is in a unique position: he already invested some time writing the entry (so adding a number isn't a lot of additional effort), plus he already has a certain point of view visible in his writing, so adding importance information wouldn't add a lot of surprises.
RSS readers can then work with that additional metadata in different ways: show a cutoff slider (between 1-100), or prompt the user how many minutes he intends to spend reading and compiling a good selection of all sources.
Options: average the numbers of each feed to catch those that try to gamble the system cut their numbers down.
How about having an RSS reader that displays a random selection of headlines (or just the latest, depending on how full your inbox is), but it only lets you read 10 of them. You can click those 10 links, but after that the rest are greyed out until the next day.
Why? Putting a limit on how many articles you read will mean you don't feel any pressure to read more. It'll also mean that you'll make sure to spend your time reading things that are interesting to you. Your daily selection of 10 articles could be used by a stumbleupon-type learning algorithm (I know NOTHING about these, by the way).
We will never be able to read everything. The question is: will I spend my time allotted for newsreading by reading the most important things, or will I randomly read important and unimportant things. The real problem is the lack of importance information in the RSS protocol. As a feed creator, no matter how many items I publish each day, people will be unhappy - some want more, some less.
Somebody has to choose which news elements are more important than other elments in a feed. And the only entity to do that is a human. We can outsource it to all users (like Google Reader does with its "like" button and the "magic" view, but this only works for very popular feeds in practice). We could let a third party do it (basically an editor. This makes for complicated 3-way protocol, plus this editor probably wants to get paid). Or we could ask the feed creator to give each item an importance value (1-100 or so). The feed creator is in a unique position: he already invested some time writing the entry (so adding a number isn't a lot of additional effort), plus he already has a certain point of view visible in his writing, so adding importance information wouldn't add a lot of surprises.
RSS readers can then work with that additional metadata in different ways: show a cutoff slider (between 1-100), or prompt the user how many minutes he intends to spend reading and compiling a good selection of all sources.
Options: average the numbers of each feed to catch those that try to gamble the system cut their numbers down.
Suggestions, feedback welcome.