Weed Whacking My Feeds
Holy cow, when I checked my Bloglines today, I had over 400 posts waiting for me. Yikes! I suppose that is what happens when one subscribes to *cough* 175 feeds. So, I've been weed whacking, unsubscribing to feeds where 1) no one has posted in months, 2) I never read the posts, and/or 3) there are just too many posts published too often. I've even had the courage to unsubscribe to some famous bigwigs. I doubt Stephen Abrams will miss my subscription and, if he posts something earth shattering, I trust you all to let me know via your own posts, Twitter, del.icio.us, the LSW Room or other social networking venues. I'm even reconsidering my subscriptions to ResourceShelf and the ReadWriteWeb, much as I love them, simply because they are so prolific that I can't keep up. I don't necessarily have to subscribe to every feed myself to keep current. I'm prioritizing feeds from LIS job sites, people I know, other LIS students, and LIS blogs that are funny, inspiring and/or incisive. I'll also keep some feeds from people who write about medical librarianship, Health and Medicine 2.0, academic librarianship and Google. I'm also keeping a few personal favorites (well, obsessions, really), like Chowhound and the Daily Puppy. Of the feeds that I drop, we shall see which ones I truly miss over the next few weeks.
Gosh, this is hard. Right now, I'm down to 152 feeds, aiming for 125. Wish me luck!
2 comments:
I go through waves on this stuff. I'm doing some retooling right now. Adding blogs from people I interact with regularly (e.g., you) and removing some stuff that isn't important to me anymore.
I was amazed how little I missed the big sites like Slashdot and Metafilter (although I'm still sticking with Boing Boing five years later). I tend to have interests that come and go (the Wii, fantasy football), so those are easy to prune upon further review.
I have 172 feeds at present, but at least a dozen of those are somehow related to work, Open Stacks or Uncontrolled Vocabulary. Another dozen are the text feeds for podcasts I listen to.
But the key is really to skim. I'm not daunted by 400 items, 'cause I could get through them in about 20 minutes, if uninterrupted. When I go away for a week and come back to 2,000 posts, that's a little scary, but I catch up in a day or two.
This is exactly what I have been concerned about as I go through this online 23 things! I am acquiring so many subscriptions and once school starts again, I will need to "schedule" time to read it all! I can also see the need to establish a regular weed session just as I do in the library! I hope it is o.k. that I cited you and linked to this post in my blog.
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