More then ever, it is easy to fall into “the Facebook hole”. Following every post of emotionally charged after another, with no end in sight.
Sure, you can filter out some of the noise with the some “likes” here and “unfollows” there, but in general, you will still be reading through a feed of advertising and generic content low on quality information which pertains directly to personal goals and interests.
Facebook is admittedly attractive however, in part due to the sheer variety of content. Is there a good alternative?
Perhaps the best option is to fall back to old technology. Specifically, by rediscovering the RSS feature embedded in sites across the web.
Most blogs, and other sites which regularly post new content support RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. RSS is an old, established technology which notifies end users of new content published on sites they follow. In fact, WordPress, a very popular website creation tool, generates these feeds by default.
Think of the use of RSS as bypassing the noise inherent in Facebook. Instead of passively viewing content pushed to you by some algorithm on Facebook, you can purposely target content you want to stay in touch with by subscribing to an RSS feed. And as a bonus, you avoid the advertising noise that comes along with the Facebook platform.
How to get started? There are a number of different RSS readers which work great to subscribe to and keep up to date on content you actually want to see. A recent lifewire article provides a number of current, relevant options.
Personally, I use The Old Reader. Why? Because it supports speed-reading with Spritz. But that’s a whole other productivity topic.
Currently, as someone working on an organization-wide transition to Agile Project Management practices, I keep in touch with the following feeds:
Please let me know in the comments any other ways you fight through the noise, or any great agile content to subscribe to via RSS.