Towards the end of last week and over the weekend I didn’t really get a chance to clear out my feeds in Google Reader, due to going out a lot, my router dying and also building a HTPC over the weekend.
Yesterday morning I was faced with hundreds of unread items. Before doing what I normally do and spend hours plodding through them and doing some frantic ‘JJJJJ’ action in Google Reader, I decided it was time to dump some feeds as it was getting ridiculous that I had to read all my feeds a couple of times a day otherwise they would become unmanageable.
It was actually quite an interesting experience and it made me realise that rather skimming 100 or so feeds, my time was much better spent just focussing on the feeds that I actually read. As a result, I’m now down to around 40 feeds which I think is more than enough to keep in touch with the latest goings on. I didn’t quite drop 90% of the feeds I read that Search Engine Journal recommended, but I came close. I think SEJ are correct in that you should unsubscribe from feeds that:
- Don’t give you anything new
- You’ve got all you can out of a site, and it’s time to use that information
- Aren’t fun
- Have no life
I think reason number 2 was the main reason I unsubscribed from most of my feeds. I had a lot of feeds in my list that I’d added whilst I was learning about blogging, or because they were uber-bloggers and I wanted to see what they were writing about so I could try and leave trackbacks. Most of those sites now don’t write much that I haven’t seen covered better in other places already, or in the case of a lot of the uber-bloggers I’ve realised that a lot of their content doesn’t warrant their ‘position’ in the blogosphere in terms of quality, and that there is a lot of better content written by normal bloggers.
At the moment I would say my 10 favourite feeds are (in no particular order):
- Techmeme (definitely my #1)
- SEOmoz
- One Tip A Day
- BBC Sport Football
- Ars Technica
- Om Malik
- Valleywag
- textually.org
- DailyTech Main News
- Tech Digest (not great content, but one of the few sites covering the UK)
What feeds or sites do you get the most out of? It’ll be interesting to see if we all read the new sites, or to see if there are any new feeds I should add now that I have created some breathing space.
