When Google Reader was retired in 2013, many people lost their favorite way to keep up with new posts from their favorite news websites and blogs. Some found alternatives, while many others replaced the cultivated environment of an RSS aggregator with social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, relying on their social networks to surface interesting material from around the web.
I didn’t consciously choose to replace RSS with social media, but I did kind of fall into the habit of using my networks for discovery, and I deliberately checked particular websites and blogs less often. Like a good many people, I moved away from RSS first by accident and then by habit. Recently, however, I’ve been working to cultivate my own media a bit more deliberately. I had a few motivations for this shift, from the feeling that I’d lost touch with a scholarly blogging community that was important to my intellectual formation to growing concerns following the last US election about the ways social media companies direct their users’ attentions.
I’ve gravitated toward Feedly, which aggregates RSS feeds under a clean, useable interface in-browser, as well as in desktop and mobile applications (or in Wavebox with a pro account). Feeds can be organized into categories, and particular posts can be organized and saved onto boards.
Last semester I taught a class in which students created their own blogs, for instance, and I created a category in Feedly with all my students’ feeds. When new posts appeared in that category, I would save them to a to grade
board.
Feedly’s free accounts allow users to aggregate up to 100 RSS feeds (more than enough for me) and maintain up to 3 boards. Feedly also includes paid tiers with more feeds and boards, as well as advanced features, such as the ability to share collections with other users or create filters that will mute posts about particular topics.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed returning to a more sustained engagement with particular news and blog websites using Feedly.
Do you use RSS? If so, tell us your favorite news aggregator in the comments?
[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Alan Levine.]