Week Five: RSS Feeds and Feed Readers

This week's 23 Things Kansas lesson focuses on the numerous ways to recieve, read, and deliver RSS feeds (if you don't know about RSS feeds, here is a nice little article with all the basics.)  As a former Blogliner, and current Google Reader, I am familiar with RSS feeds and various readers. 

Today I examined Feed My Inbox (FMI), a service that allows you to send website RSS feeds to your email, rather than through a secondary reader.  I also added a Feed My Inbox form on Egads!' side nagivation menu for you to try.  Simply input your email and you should start recieving my RSS feed in your inbox!

Getting RSS feeds via email seems like a good idea--I actually prefer Microsoft Outlook's built in RSS feed reader, but in some ways FMI seems to be a step back; filling up my Inbox with information that I do not need right now. Outlook provides a separate area for RSS feeds, thus adding a division between important information, my incoming emails, and RSS feeds, which I can view later.   This subtle division within the Outlook interface actually translates into a huge time savor, as I recieve dozens of emails an hour without adding RSS feeds into the mix.


However, Feed My Inbox does provide that "one stop shop" appeal in that you do not have to log into a seperate site to see your RSS feeds.  I am consistantly guilty of not checking my Google Reader feeds, which is why Outlook incorporated RSS and sites like FMI are gaining popularity.  However, if you are like me and do not use Outlook at home, a web-based reader or a site like FMI which delivers RSS to your email, could be a nice solution.

Also, a quick fix for having RSS feeds going into your email, is simply to create an email rule that moves all RSS feeds into a seperate folder--which is essentially what Outlook does for you automatically.

What solutions have you found best to organize your RSS feeds? Software? Behavior modification? Shock therapy?