Sometimes I get ideas in my head of how I wish applications would work, today I was thinking that I would love it if feed readers could incorporate some sort of "calendar" or "priority" system, or both. I haven't found it yet, probably because this doesn't exist. If somebody does develop something like this I'd like to know about it.
The idea is that I have hundreds of feeds in my reader, each producing a large amount of new items every day. Some I read more often than others, and they're tagged and organized, but when I do get to reading them, I just go down the list of tags one at a time. That means I know what new books AADL is promoting in their catalog, or what the blogosphere is talking about today, but I may not get to what the library world, or even my own friends have to say because after 10 or 20 minutes of reading, I have to go do something else. It feels like I read the same 5 feeds everyday sometimes, and they're not always the 5 feeds I want to read. I could reorganize my tags corresponding to different days of the week (I have tried a version of this before) but I still would like to keep my current tagging in place, and that still puts everything in alphabetical order. The way I see it in my head, the reader would limit the feeds to only show me the ones I designate for a certain day. The idea behind this would be to avoid distractions from other feeds. A priority system would always push certain feeds to the top, so I never miss the ones I really want to read if I only have a few minutes for the day.
I guess I like the calendar idea, also, as I explained before, I like to see things and I don't often log into my feed reader everyday. As I'm writing this though I'm thinking of a way I could hack a system using Netvibes, which I do see everyday, and my feed reader, Rojo. Netvibes allows me to add feeds to my start page, I can even show and hide certain elements on the page. Using Rojo I can categorize my feeds using days of the week, like I mentioned before, but Rojo has an added feature of allowing you to get an RSS feed of categories (or tags). I could actually take that category RSS (the new ones corresponding to the days of the week), and add that to my Netvibes, where I can see it when I start my browser every day. I'm not sure if it will help, but it might be worth a shot...anything to tame the information overload. Until somebody invents my perfect feed calendar it might just have to do :)
Check out Grazer http://www.grazr.com/ . OPML can be used as a container for lots of RSS feeds. I am still not brave enough to take the plunge but you seem fearless when you have the time. One idea would be to have RSS feeds of various well defined search parameters. You can use it for flicker photos too. The blog URL is http://blog.grazr.com/ I think embedded micro browsers use similar techniques, see http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/03/24/embedded_micro_browsers_offer_enhanced.htm
Here is another tool - says it allows you to group your feeds into categories (days?)
http://www.blogbridge.com/product.php