The Voraciousness of RSS Feeds

Or should that be voracity?

Last spring I used Google Reader to set up an RSS reader for my personal feeds. I played with the organizational capabilities of Google Reader, subscribing to lots of feeds and organizing them in a few semi-sensible headings - Entertainment, Green, Politics, Science, and Blogs I'm Following. I quickly recognized several mistakes I made.

• Aggregator sites are dumb candidates to subscribe to. I subscribed to an entertainment site that posts scores of cute internet stories daily, and my Reader was quickly overwhelmed. I'd be better off just visiting a site like that, if I want to see some cute.


• Magazine features can be dumb candidates to subscribe, if I read lots of features in that magazine. I read Slate on a regular basis, and I generally scan most of it. The stories are already organized on the Slate website; subscribing to individual columns or features and sorting them into my Reader was just redundant, slower than reading them directly on the Slate website, and again a huge clutter to my Reader.


• On the other hand, subscribing to just a few features from a magazine or news source I don't generally peruse is a good use for my Reader. I don't generally read the New York Times, but I subscribed to the environmental stories and had a reasonable number of articles drop into my reader that I would not otherwise have seen.


• The reader is a good place to have things drop that I don't usually think about but I like to see every now and then. I was pleasantly reminded about the fun comic xkcd, to which I subscribed last spring but have forgotten about until now.


• I was thoroughly intimidated by the volume of material that swamped my reader when I oversubscribed. At first I tried to manage the Reader - reading, scanning, deleting things I'd read, then deleting old entries I hadn't read, and then (rather quickly) abandoning the whole damn thing.

So today I revisited my Reader - 1,000+ showed for virtually every source I subscribed to last spring. I unsubscribed to the aggregator sites, I unsubscribed to the Slate features, I marked everything as read. I'll try to start viewing it daily, see if there's some other pruning I can easily do, and find out whether I can make this thing worthwhile for me.