Along with sheer creativity, one of a problogger’s best resources are his/her feed subscriptions. You can get a lot of ideas from current events or from what other people are saying. A feedreader definitely makes life easier, as it helps one monitor favorite blogs without necessarily having to visit each site. Of course, this nifty tool gets to display its dark side once you have hundreds or even thousands of feeds subscribed. It can be a nightmare to maintain, both in terms of system resources and in your ability to organize.

Here’s what Firefox tells me whenever it loads Bloglines on my (not-so-new) Powerbook:

bloglines delay.png

I sometimes get this Firefox warning on my other (faster) computers, too. To me, it basically means “time to clean up your feeds.”

Bloglines says I have 660 feeds. And you know what? I don’t exactly get to read each and every one of them anymore. My feed list started growing because I also used it as my blogs’ blogroll using the Bloglines “share” feature. Then it got out of hand. I found myself adding each and every blog I visited that had some interesting post I wanted to save (this was before I got hooked on del.icio.us). Since then, I relied less and less on Bloglines to monitor information online. Still, I do use Bloglines to easily check out new content from the blogs I find to be authorities in their respective fields, my blogging contacts, and as well some up-and-coming bloggers who are worth the read. And I still do use Bloglines to automatically generate my blogroll.

Cutting down my feeds would take some time, though. Bloglines does give me an option to easily delete unwanted feeds, but the real dilemma is deciding which ones to let go of and how to better re-organize my subscriptions. I currently organize them by the blog’s theme and topic, but sometimes the taxonomy lines get blurred (here’s why I love tagging!).

Any suggestions? I’d be interested to know how other people organizes RSS subscriptions.

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