On information, feeds and aggregators

Rajesh Jain points me to an interesting piece by Werner Vogels (via The Shifted Librarian):

The increase in the number of feeds will leave many users frustrated, as there is a limit to the number feeds one can scan and read. Current numbers suggest that readers can handle 150-200 feeds without too much stress. But users will want to read more and more as new interesting feeds become available and they run into the limitations of the metaphor of  current aggregator applications. The current central abstract of aggregators is that of a feed, and there is a limit to how many individual feeds one can actually handle. Aggregators will need to find ways in which the users can be subscribed to a select set of feeds because they want to read everything that comes from these feeds, but also subscribe to a much larger set of publishers for which the feed abstraction may not be the right metaphor. Aggregation, fusion and selection at the information item level instead of at the feed level seems to be a first abstractions to investigation.

One way of separating the information from the feed might be to watch out for specific keywords that one is interested in. In my day job, I need to know what's new about certain topics every day. FeedDemon allows me to create Watches that will watch for these words in all the feeds I subscribe to. So I don't even know now how many feeds I'm subscribed to today. It just doesn't matter.

Of course, this can only be done if one has certain keywords in mind. But it's a pretty efficient quick-and-dirty way of gleaning information from a vast (and growing) number of sources. The time saved can be used to read in full only those feeds that are truly important to oneself.

Thoughts?