When I hear people talking about how many feeds they subscribe to, I’m nearly always astounded by the amount. I’ve seen the number vary from 80 to 500. That’s just crazy. I admire any person who is able to give so much time to their feeds because they’re probably the most productive people on the earth.
I certainly don’t have enough time (sadly) to give even eighty blogs the time and attention they deserve. Because I don’t put any blog in my feed reader. I’ll add a blog in there if I really, really enjoy it and I get excited about a new post coming down the line. If not, then that blog probably just isn’t for me.
Right now I’m subscribed to twenty-eight feeds, I’ve done this by employing a couple of methods that allow me to sort through the noise and get not only the most important news – but also the best opinions in the blogosphere.
Subscribe to Aggregators
I don’t use a folder system in NetNewsWire, but if I did – the Apple folder would contain only three blogs. Daring Fireball and Nobody Wants A Stylus (which currently seems to have slowed down a bit unfortunately) are two of the blogs. What you’ll notice about these is that they both sift through all Apple and iPhone news leaving only the most relevant pieces.
To top that they also happen to offer some terrific opinion articles that I know a large amount of the Apple community values. The third blog I subscribe to in this category happens to be The Macalope – because he’s just plain funny and offers a sometimes very different insight into Apple’s habits.
I’ve been able to do this in a lot of areas, and if I didn’t subscribe to so many personal blogs (not that that’s a bad thing) I would probably be subscribed to a lot less feeds as that makes up a large percentage of what I read.
Visit the Big Boys
Who are the big boys? These are blogs that tend to relay interesting a relevant (in my opinion) news. So, you’ve got the classic examples such as Engadget and Autoblog. But the thing is, I don’t subscribe to them, instead I visit them using my web browser.
Why? Simply because I probably only read about ten percent of the posts that are written, thoroughly. Instead, I visit the site in question and skim through all the recent articles until I see a story title that I find interesting.
Blogs like these tend to post several new pieces a day and all that would do – if subscribed – would be clog up my feed reader and in the end stop me from using one all together.
Feeds are precious things. Sadly a good one is very hard to come by. Right now I’m looking for more: interesting, insightful and thought provoking weblogs.
For those interested, they can download a copy of my OPML file here (right click and save as) and if they have any suggestions for a new blog I should try out or want to share their OPML file – please leave a comment pointing it out.
