Engadget: too much of a good thing?
I think it’s about time I asked the question: is Engadget’s daily wall-to-wall coverage too much of a good thing? I suspect it isn’t the first time (nor will it be the last), but Randall’s pal J killed us from our feed for being guilty of high quality overload: “I’m about to delete my Engadget feed out of my feed reader. Why? They’re too good. They update too much. I can’t keep up. And that makes me feel bad about myself.”
I think J’s definitely taking it to heart, but I suspect he isn’t the first to give up. 40+ posts a day isn’t an easy thing to hang on to, even for the tech obsessed — I totally understand. Any feed that updates that often — even the NYT — I almost always end up expunging from my OPML. So short of posting less (sorry, just ain’t gonna happen), I wonder what creative things might be done to help readers hone in on the Engadget content they want? I have a number of ideas (the first and by far the easiest being that we try harder to make sure people are aware of our breaking news feed at http://www.engadget.com/tag/breaking+news/rss.xml), but I’m definitely curious to know how you, the Engadget reader, would prefer to get the latest tech news from us.
Engadget Daily Newspaper, of course! :-D
Silly Ryan…Silly me…
Comment by Subir — Saturday, April 28, 2007 @ 7:42 pm
Maybe I’m “tech obsessed,” but I can’t get enough engadget. I definitely am not overwhelmed by it at all.
Comment by ben — Saturday, April 28, 2007 @ 8:12 pm
Ryan - I dropped Engadget, CrunchGear, and Gizmodo, back in Feb, as I shared in this post: http://stuffleufagus.com/2007/02/15/blog-trimming-how-to-gain-back-an-hour-a-day-without-missing-anything-really-important/
Why? I can’t keep up, the RSS feed didn’t have the granularity I wanted, and somehow, one of my friends or another will still send me the things I really want to know about.
Want to know how to fix it (for me at least)? Built me a simple interface to tell you what I am interested in. Build me a custom RSS feed from that. Make it drop dead easy to manage - from set-up to changes - it has to be easy.
I don’t have time to filter your posts - unless you make it easy for me.
Cell Phones - don’t care.
USB crap - nope.
Laptops, cameras - yep.
Apple, PC, or Linux? All, or two of the three? - let me choose.
Stuff announced, or stuff available? - It makes a difference to me. Let me choose.
If I could easily filter Engadget, I would still be subscribed to Engadet.
Rob
Comment by Rob La Gesse — Saturday, April 28, 2007 @ 8:15 pm
I’m sad to say that I too have deleted the Engadget RSS feed for the same reason. I also write a gadget column and I just find so much stuff that I plain have no interest in. It’s hard for me to give you any really good advice on this subject. I found myself just looking in my “tech” tab in Netvibes seeing 60 unread stories in Engadget, sighing and marking all as read. I’m just not going to take a full half hour to plow through all of them. I think honestly you have to trim the fat a little here. Sure the humping dog USB key is funny, but seriously, haven’t we got enough of this shit already? Looking at the feed right now, I see at least 5 stories that I just don’t see why I would care about. The quality of the writing is punchy and funny. But it’s hard to get pumped up about another GPS unit, or a cheap-o Chinese LCD, etc.
Comment by Knots — Saturday, April 28, 2007 @ 8:47 pm
Ryan, I am a happy Engadget RSS feed reader. I did drop Boing Boing a bit ago due to the signal/noise factor, and am thinking of doing the same for a few of the Political sites I read who have a lot of “New Open Thread” type of posts. (Eschaton, Talking Points Memo, etc.)
However, Engadget does a great job, period. Don’t be apologizing for doing too well. As you already offer category feeds, which I assume hits a subset of all stories, you have already offered the solution. Maybe you could highlight the category feeds to those who are suffering an overindulgence, and encourage them to add only those topics they are interested in…
Comment by Louis Gray — Saturday, April 28, 2007 @ 10:48 pm
Hi Ryan, I suffer from the same problem from your RSS feed - it’s too much effort to wade through the stuff I don’t care about to see the stories that are significant (or popular). Here’s two suggestions:
1. Have an “editor’s choice” RSS feed. Hand-pick a few (3-5) major stories from the day and release them daily. I wouldn’t read totality of the Engadget feed but I definitely would read this.
2. Have an RSS feed with a comment number threshold as the criteria for release. For example, if a comment reaches 50+ comments, then have it released to the feed. Call it something like “most talked-about articles”. This would help filter out the stories the majority of people aren’t really that interested in.
Hope this helps, because I love reading Engadget for the writing style and the content, but sometimes it’s just all too hard to get to the good stuff.
Comment by James Croft — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 12:36 am
After a long time, I deleted the feed a month ago, for the same reason here presented. I searched for a trimmed down, just the important things feed , but couln’t find it, I didn’t know which feed to subscribe to. I said: lets listen to the podcast only, that would be enough. I feel it isn’t, but I couldn’t carry the load of passing all the headlines and you making me to always have unrad items in my google reader.
I’ll try the breaking news thing.
Comment by Jorge — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 7:35 am
I also dropped Engadget’s feed pretty quickly because of the overload. I think Rob’s idea is great — offer multiple, more specific feeds. You could also have an Editor’s Pick feed, which covered only maybe the top five or so items of the day. I would definitely subscribe to that.
Comment by Nima — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 7:50 am
Rob — come to think of it, I think I do remember seeing that post. Tag/catgory filters for showing the front page and feeds is definitely a good idea (and one we’ve toyed around with), but it could be extremely difficult to accomplish with our system. We’re built to take a beating from literally millions of people at once, so we’re very vertical, but not to horizontal. I’ll def see what our techs think though.
Knots — you must be thinking of the myriad other blogs that wrote about the USB humping dog. We didn’t cover it.
James — we do have something like a “must read Engadget feed”, the breaking news feed. Check it out! As for the commented on feed, that’s def an idea worth looking into.
Comment by Ryan Block — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 8:17 am
Id like to add my vote for a tag system on Engadget with RSS feeds for each tag (real broad though, like ‘Gaming’, ‘Software’, ‘photography’ etc). I havent unsubscribed to Engadget but there is too much for me that is of little interest. You guys do a great job of covering so much stuff that its hard for me to just find the posts I would be interested in.
Comment by Jamie — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 8:42 am
I manage to keep up with engadget, but mostly because I’ve dumped alot of the other tech feeds I used to browse. Not only do you guys hit most topics I care about, but the writing is actually far better than most. (I won’t name names, but the tone of the site that starts with “G” and ends with “izmodo” gets on my nerves).
I don’t know your back-end set up, but instead of trying to allow for custom feeds (which would rock but be complicated to implement) or just a breaking news “must have” feed, what about something along the lines of a small, medium and large feed?
Kind of Geek: You have your breaking news/editor’s choice feed for the big releases/reviews and major tech company chaos
Geek: Same as above, add in any product/software release (no announcements w/o release info) and breaking scientific discoveries
Binary Geek: Everything, from zero all the way to one - the rumors, the announcements without release info, the tech soap opera stories and yes, even the random USB crap
I don’t know if this is really any easier of a system than being able to filter by tag to get a custom feed like Rob suggested, but if it is, it might make for a nice middle ground.
Any way you break it, I’ll still keep you guys at the top of my feeds, and somehow, I’ll manage to spend the 2 seconds deciding which stories to ignore.
Cheers
Comment by modus — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 9:22 am
[...] too many updates, causing people to unsubscribe to their feed. This article was spurred by Ryan Block’s post on his personal blog asking, “Is Engadget’s daily wall-to-wall coverage too much of a good [...]
Pingback by Too Much" in RSS feeds? « Late to the Party — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 11:08 am
I too unsubscribed longer ago. Partly because there were too many updates, but I realize I could probably create category feed subscriptions. The problem is, even within a given category, there’s a bunch of coverage I’d end up not caring about.
The other big reason was I was getting jealous of all the cool new toys I’d read about that ever weren’t out yet, weren’t going to come out in the US, or I couldn’t afford.
Perhaps if entries had a ‘major/minor’ rating and I could subscribe to only major updates (on a per category basis)? But one person’s major is another person’s minor, and you’ve got several people writing for Engadget with differing opinions.
I did just go back and subscribe to the Features and Announcements feeds, to dip my toes into the water again.
Comment by Joost Schuur — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 2:27 pm
Ryan: I’m not seeing a feed for http://www.engadget.com/tag/breaking+news/. What’s the URL?
Comment by Joost Schuur — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 2:33 pm
I agree with Rob La Gesse’s idea for several different feeds depending on the content. Don’t forget that at the moment we also get some cross posting between Engadget, Engadget Mobile and Engadget HD.
I’d also suggest MSNBC’s feed feature with the Most Viewed stories.
Comment by Titanas — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 4:29 pm
Count me as one who wants MORE Engadget, NOT LESS. If anything, I’m a bit confused about the cross-posting between Engadget and Engadget Mobile (I subscribe to both, but not sure why I do). All in all, I see Engadget as my go-to source for bleeding edge tech info, and if that requires 40 or 80 or 180 posts per day, so be it. You guys keep me ahead of the curve. :)
Comment by Urban Strata — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 5:50 pm
Joost, it’s http://www.engadget.com/tag/breaking+news/rss.xml
You can do that with any Engadget tag. For instance:
http://www.engadget.com/tag/microsoft
http://www.engadget.com/tag/microsoft/rss.xml
http://www.engadget.com/tag/apple
http://www.engadget.com/tag/apple/rss.xml
Jeffrey: our crossposting method is generally characterized as “most important 10% of mobile / HD news” hits the front page. Occasionally we’ll have stuff that isn’t necessarily so super important, but that we feel people just definitely need to know about.
Comment by Ryan Block — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 6:53 pm
Good thing I went here reading your article. I didn’t know about the “breaking news feed”. I feel relieved … Since like 2 or 3 weeks, I felt the same way and began to quit reading Engadget because of the quantity of the news.
Maybe you should make an annoucement on Engadget about the breaking news feed, I’m sure LOTS of people don’t know about it !
Antoine
Comment by Antoine — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
Antoine, we did announce it — see the big box on the right that says “see what’s new at Engadget”? It’s been in there since last September.
Comment by Ryan Block — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 7:38 pm
Ryan: In Antoine’s defense, the link box on the front page has no specific RSS icon for the breaking news feed, the breaking news feed page itself doesn’t auto-discover that specific feed, and there’s no info on http://www.engadget.com/feeds/ about the per-tag feeds either.
In fact, there are some placeholders or unparsed tags on the latter that just read ‘%Overview%’ next to each category feed.
Good to know about tag feeds though, thanks!
Comment by Joost Schuur — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 9:26 pm
Joost, it should autodetect. It does in all my browsers, we have the code in the page:
Thanks for pointing that out in the feeds page though, I’ll have to look into that tomorrow AM!
Comment by Ryan Block — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 9:30 pm
When I’m at http://www.engadget.com/tag/breaking+news/ and look at the source, I see:
…link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”/rss.xml” /…
That resolves as http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml.
Seems to me if you want to auto-detect the tag specific feed, it should read href=”rss.xml” to get the proper relative URL.
Comment by Joost Schuur — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 9:37 pm
You’re absolutely right. Another fun bug! I wonder how many thousands of people this prevented from seeing the feed… very frustrating.
Comment by Ryan Block — Sunday, April 29, 2007 @ 9:43 pm
I tried adding Engadget to my Technology feeds, but it was just too much. I also have problems keeping up with Google News feed, and dropped it as well. I hate having things in my reader that are unread, and I never get around to reading them all. I always tell myself I’ll read them later in the afternoon or evening, but never do.
What you should do is have categories and allow people to subscribe to them. I want to hear about Apple things, robots, non-PDA cellphones, any article with the word “monkey” in it, and any breaking news. You need a page that users can use to craft a custom feed. I could do it with Yahoo Pipes I guess, but I’m far too lazy for it right now.
That said, Engadget really is a great site. I listen to the podcast, as it is a nice condensation of what is happening without having to sift through hundreds of posts. The only thing I can think of to make the podcast more entertaining would be a crossover between BOL and Engadget.
Comment by Sean Kelly — Monday, April 30, 2007 @ 8:33 am
[...] frequent and unfortunate use of mark all as read, and a gradually shrinking OPML). Naturally, the irony isn’t lost on me; trust me, Engadget readers experiencing news overload have my complete sympathy. It’s not [...]
Pingback by How do you read your feeds? » Ryan Block — Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 2:41 pm
I was initially overwhelmed with the Engadget feed as well, but using Google Reader i found a system that works for me. I quickly scan through a few times a day, starring the stuff that looks interesting/useful/relevant. During a break or when I get home from work I then take the time to read the starred items.
I agree that a custom feed configuration, perhaps based on tags or keyworks would be cool.
Comment by Dave Storm — Wednesday, November 21, 2007 @ 3:01 pm