News feed access somewhere above Iowa

I’ve posted a bit in the past about Netvibes, the RSS aggregator that I use to catch and organize all of the web content I consume. My Netvibes page currently catches feeds from ~125 different sites and organizes them into 11 different tabbed categories which, when I’m online, constantly refresh themselves. This allows me to monitor the content of all of these sites from one web location and vastly increases the amount of information that I can consume. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Good because I can stay up to speed on things I’m interested in very easily. Bad because I’m interested in a lot of things. The sites that I subscribe to regularly produce new content – probably an average of 4 items per day. Across 125 sites, that’s ~500 new things to read a day. If I read all of that everyday, I would get very little accomplished. Accordingly I’ve gotten pretty good at scanning my Netvibes pages throughout the day and catching the gems, although I definitely need to get better at limiting the number of times I scan my feeds though, as it is tough to avoid getting sidetracked.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the back row of an airplane somewhere over Iowa reading through my feeds. I’m not connected to the internet (I’m going to post this later today), but I let my Netvibes pages refresh this morning before I went to the airport and kept the browser window open afterwards. My pages collected all the content from my sites and now I can read through the new stuff from my feeds. Netvibes collects the full content of an item for the first three items in a feed. For stories #4 and on, the only thing you can read without a web connection is the headline and the first few sentences. So this means right now I have access to the full content for the first three items of each feed in my account…roughly 375 articles. Pretty cool stuff considering I’m 34,000 feet above Iowa. I’ve included some screenshots below to illustrate.

Page view of my Entrepreneur Blog Netvibes tabbed page – the first three stories in each feed are readable off line.

Full story from Marc Andreessen’s blog captured by Netvibes – readable off line.

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