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!
The Alter Egozi 
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!
I think the point for shared’ is to see what they’ve maekrd read not to see more items from another source. I actually like to see what others have read regardless if I’ve already read it, since that just shows I’m interested in the same topic and if connected through another service (like pownce) I can message him/her.