What is the best way to monitor community-driven websites like stackoverflow, digg, etc?

Question

I've tried RSS feeds, but these always-updating sites that have tons of entries per day just fill up my poor reader. I do keep my Google Reader, I monitor quite a few feeds, but they are all (with the exception of Lifehacker and icanhascheezburger) feeds that have at most one or two entries per day.

Right now, I keep a bookmark in my toolbar for Stack Overflow and click it at random times, whenever I'm not doing anything, but I always feel like I'm missing the important posts by taking random samples.

How do you monitor stackoverflow? What's the best way to get the best information out of it while not having to deal with the questions that I neither care about nor have time for?

How did you find this question in the sea of questions here on stackoverflow?

Answer 1

How did you find this question in the sea of questions here on stackoverflow?

I just check the front page regularly, but I'm lame like that.

Answer 2

did you try the "interesting tags" feature here at SOF ?

Answer 3

I try to spend 30 mins browsing through all the new questions in SOF. I visit other forums I follow and read "New posts"!

I also subscribe[email] to important posts!

Answer 4

I use Google Reader with 3 different folders. "Personal" is for sites which only update 1 - 2 times a day and which I will read through carefully. "News" is for sites like the NYT which have ~10 updates a day and I would like to at least skim through to find interesting content. "Browse" is for sites which are a flood of content and I go through it when I have the time.

This way, you can make sure you keep track of all your important content and also see stuff like SO.

Answer 5

I use Google Reader - it updates regularly, and I rarely miss on any feed item which interests me. Yep, there's quite a few of questions on stack', but you put your viewer in "list view", and it works ok. It's also better than having to scroll down the main page on stack'.

Answer 6

Have you heard of Yahoo Pipes? IMO this is an incredible tool - you take an RSS feed and pipe it through some filters. For example, you could filter all SO questions that contain the keywords you're interested in.