Down to 75 feeds
One of the ways I keep up on things that interest me is a daily read of my RSS-feeds (another is keeping up with the people I follow on Twitter). After discovering RSS feeds I pretty much subscribed to every blog I came upon that took my fancy. Having done that for a couple of years lead to having 200-plus feeds in my Google reader about 6 months ago which in turn lead to having to sift through hundreds of posts a day. I realized I had to put a stop to that because a) it took up way too much of my time and b) not all the information I got was valuable.
So I set myself to a limit of a total of 75 feeds.
In order to get there I didn’t want to weed out just the excess feeds all at once, but take a look at every feed and see how much value it provided me. The first hundred or so weren’t that difficult: those were the ones that were always late with news I got from other blogs or blogs that were virtual identical to others. But going down from say 120 to 75 proved to be more of a challenge. One of the last to go for instance was Engadget, a site I have been following for pretty much as long as I know there are blogs out there. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with Engadget which is by far the best gadget blog out there. But I’m not interested in every trinket that comes out any longer but more on the big stuff (say the Nexus One or Apple iPad of late). Those are also covered by sites like Mashable and Techcrunch, who also provide news on social media and web related business, something that isn’t covered (much) by Engadget. So Engadget had to go.
That did feel a bit like saying goodbye to an old friend though.
But all in all I’m just happy I reached my goal. There are probably still some feeds that could go, but for now I’ll just keep it the way it is. What this exercise has taught me though is being more picky when it comes to subscribing or keeping feeds. That’s a good thing because I don’t want to waste my time on things that don’t hold any value to me.
