Dave Winer says I don’t read his posts. He’s right, I admit. I skim.
I’m overloaded. So in the past few months I’ve gradually reduced my subscription list from over 50 feeds to around a dozen, and at the same time increased my reliance on Genieo, which claims to be tracking already 537 feeds for me (though not all are ones I really would fully subscribe to, but that’s the beauty of it…)
When trying to understand what had happened, I came to realize my reader subscriptions list was made of two types of feeds:
- Feeds that are generally on topics I’m interested in
- Blogs where I thought the author was interesting or smart
Type #1 is, being practical, simply not scalable. There are just too many good sources out there, and not all posts in them are really read-worthy for me, even if just to skim through. So I let Genieo discover those feeds (just clicking through to some posts) and then removed them from my subscription list. It’s amazing how good it feels to safely eliminate a feed from your reader (“…yes, I am sure I want to delete!” 
)
Type #2 is more tricky as I would usually be interested in all of the posts even if not in my topics of interest. These include blogs by friends, and blogs by smart people I stumbled upon who seemed worth following. I also wouldn’t want Genieo (or any other learning reader for that matter) to think I’m generally interested in those more random topics and clutter my personalized feed. So I still kept this much shorter list in my reader, but I know I can visit them a lot less frequently and not lose anything.
This combination has been working well for me in recent months. Social diet hurray!
I had to delete around 35 feeds from my Google Reader yesterday, I just couldn’t keep up!
I love the way you split the list into two “moods” thus two different tools to follow. I think I’ll try Genieo for my interests and stick with Google Reader for my interesting people. Thanks!