Relieving my severe addiction to feeds
“Hi, my name is Gary, and I’m an addict.”
To drugs? No, silly! To feeds! When I counted, yesterday, I had no less than 200 feed subscriptions in Google Reader; according to some people, this is a tiny number and I should continue subscribing to feeds. To me, though, I eventually found it a bit excessive.
The important thing to consider is if you are getting a lot of duplicate content in the feeds, and if you are, then you should start purging feeds that simply echo content that you find in your other feeds. This was the case for me.
Just a few minutes ago, I put my feed reader on a diet and unsubscribed to about 150 feeds, so that I’m now left with 53 feeds. I plan on skimming that down a bit more to, at most, 50 feeds, and plan on keeping it below that.
I’m actually having a hard time deciding on which 3 feeds to cut from my list; the first 150 feeds were easy to decide on, but the last 3 are the hardest! I have to determine which feed gives me the least amount of value for reading it.
For example, I plan on keeping the feeds that give my list some variety; I’m subscribed to a blog on cooking, one on comics, and one about personal development, to keep a bit of variety intact.
One thing that I find really useful are the statistics that Google Reader provides; I’m talking about what they call Trends, which Google released at the beginning of this year. It really helps to see which of your feeds have been inactive for the longest time.
The feed with the oldest post that is its most recent, was made back in April 20. That’s not that long ago, so this shows that the feeds that I’ve subscribed to at least post fairly regularly. I’ve got 20 feeds that post at least once a day, so I’ve got plenty of content coming in with fewer duplicates because each feed is covering a fairly different niche from each other.
I’m sure there are plenty of other people out there that seriously feel like you’re stuck under an avalanche of information sometimes. How many feeds are YOU subscribed to? How do you cope with all of the information that you receive every day?
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I have had varying levels of information addiction (if this isn’t a term, it should be) over the last little while. Now I have around 40 feeds, most of which post more than weekly but less than daily, so it isn’t hard to keep up with them all.
But I was once at a point where I had a desktop aggregator and would refresh all the time. Even recently, I went for a few weeks reading every story that came into Digg and Reddit (not actually clicking the link necessarily, just reading the headline).
Currently I use iGoogle and scan over the page a few times a day to see if I notice any new links.
Paul, regarding Digg, I sort of used to be like that before, but now, I just read the top 3 headlines for each day. I’m not nearly as bad with Digg as other people are. Also, for my feeds, I’ve learned to skim through items like there’s no tomorrow; I can brush through 50 items in about a minute, because I just glance at the headlines and only star what I think is read-worthy and then go back to my Starred items afterwards.
Also, ‘information addiction’ is indeed a term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_addiction
You’re nuts I say, nuts! I’ve only got 10. How is an April 20th post recent? Email me some of your more interesting feeds, I’m sure there’s quite a few in your list that I’d enjoy.
David, most of mine are techie ones. I’ve got a few that aren’t, but a lot are for learning Ruby code, etc.
Gary, I feel your pain. I’m stuck in the same vortex of having to continuously add new feeds to my reader.. but then not reading most of them, because the sheer volume of the content is just too much.
To answer your question about the number of feeds, take a look at my earlier blog post: Reinventing RSS Readers.
In the near future, I’m hoping you want have to purge your reader. I think I know how to solve the problem, and I’m hoping to launch our product within the next month. In other words, stay tuned!
Ilya, yikes, sounds like there’s going to be some new disruptive tool coming soon. I can’t wait!
I’m not sure how you count your feeds in blogbridge but I have too many. Way too many. Even with the star-rating system my opml is out of hand. Time for me to purge too I think
Whew Gary! I thought u were on the crackpipe or sumthin LOL! Cuz “feeds” sounds like slang for a narcotic. So uh u got rid of those ripoff ads huh! Good, Gary!
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