The Demon in the Feeds

This isn’t about FeedDemon or Google buying Feedburner. But it is about RSS.

I've become a bit of a feed freak and need to go on an RSS diet. RSS should fuel posts and speed up my ability to stay current on the topics of my choice. But as my feeds are currently organized, RSS is slowing me down. With more than 5,800 posts marked “Keep New,” do you think I’ll ever be able to reference them all? Really Simple Syndication my arse.

As an experiment, I left my Bloglines account untouched for 24 hours to see how many new posts would accumulate. I’m following 159 feeds, which includes blogs, news sources and a couple of aggregated feeds. Todd And’s Power 150 for example. That feed doubles the number I’m tracking.

In one day, 686 new posts accumulated. No mas.

There’s enough duplication across the aggregated and individual feeds that I’m going to jump into Yahoo! Pipes, strip out any duplicate subscriptions and create several custom feeds organized by topic.

How do you handle RSS overload?

UPDATE: Some great comments to this post have already helped me cut a few feeds from my reader. More changes to come.

RSS is delicious uploaded by nickgerakines
tags | RSS | blog

Comments

[James Cherkoff]

I know the feeling! I just read the feeds I actually like - rather than the ones I think I *should* read. But that's still 150 so I am thinking about deleting the lot and re-choosing my top 50. Not easy - there's alot of good stuff out there!

[Betsy]

I take honest stock of my subscriptions regularly. If I haven't been reading one, even if I really should be reading it, I remove it.

[John Whiteside]

Brutal trimming. I now always ask, "How useful is this? Can I put this info to work? Is this the fifth time I've read about this topic?"

One great thing to remember: if a hot topic pops up in a group of blogs you read (such as marketing or PR blogs), you'll find out about that post on the feed you dropped, because others will talk about it. There's a real role for bloggers who "metablog" about what other bloggers are talking about - you get the best parts of feeds you don't have time to follow.

[Kevin Dugan]

Thanks to everyone for the input. And I know of at least one blogger who dumps all feeds and starts from scratch now and then to ensure he is only reading what he needs (Oberkirch or McEnany methinks).

John - You make a good point on metablog. It's the whole reason I do not subscribe to Scoble...I don't need to. Other PR/Marketing folks point me to the posts relevant to my interest and I do not have to sort through the more technical ones as a result (my loss, not his). It's really a compliment to someone if you can follow them through a third blogger.

The other point to make here is that you also want feeds NO ONE else is reading so you're pointing to original content.

As I read these comments and this post, it's funny to realize that we're giving our feeds personalities almost. "I don't like you like that!" I need to be more brutal about it. Thanks again.

[Matt Haverkamp]

Every three to four months I clean house - completely. Basically just start over. Maybe not so efficient, but nice to totally go RSS free for a few days.

[Susan Getgood]

Two tips, which I practice religiously.

1. Stop using "keep new" in bloglines, unless it is just for later the same day. Scan the post, and if it is really worthwhile tag it in del.icio.us. Easier to grab the links if you go to write a post as well.

2. When you can't read for a while (vacation, too much work or whatever) skim your favorites and then just mark everything read, start clean. If a topic is really hot it will get mentioned again on one or more of the blogs you read.

[Kevin Dugan]

These are all great tips. I've already used them to whittle my feeds down from 159 to 140 without hesitation. Putting some thought into it, I know I can get that number down even further. Thanks!