Here’s a tip on how to filter selected items out of your feed reader. The example I use here uses Google Reader, because that is the reader I use. I do not know if it can be applied in other readers (perhaps with modification), but I assume there is something similar for at least some other readers.
In starting through a list of about 320 feed headlines earlier today, I kept running across article after article on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. Since there is little anyone can really say about this right now, other than offering some opinion, I quickly saw that these stories were not really adding anything of value for me, and wanted to filter them out. So, I entered “microsoft yahoo” in the search field, as illustrated below:
This turned up over 60 items, by the way (including the ones I had already “read”). I looked for a way to mark all of these as “read,” so they would disappear from my feed list, but did not find a way. However, I decided to switch to the “Expanded View,” as illustrated below, and then just held down my “j” key until all were marked as having been read.
This is a useful trick to remember for any occasion when there is a firestorm of blogging about a topic you only want to read about once. For me, it paid off today by killing off a bunch of headlines that have no value to me (or anyone else, as far as I can tell).
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