I’ve pared my Bloglines subscriptions from a high of 154 to 148, and I’m feeling pretty good. There were a few echo-chamber feeds (same info, different person) that needed to go, and I trimmed a few under-producing blogs (sorry, Textism, but you don’t write often enough to warrant the space). I also replaced a few local news feeds with a Topix search feed for Chicago. I don’t follow any Chicago news celebs, and this gets me a nice selection of local news.
I started thinking about my feed weeding. Am I really reducing my local news redundancy by replacing individual feeds with an aggregator of news feeds? The mix I’m looking for in my feed subscriptions is a nice selection of feeds on multiple topics that keep the overall number of things I read to a manageable level. I’ll keep the Topix feed if I find it gets me similar coverage as multiple local feeds for the same or lesser time committment.
I’ll have to pay particular attention to similar feeds in the future. I want lots of coverage for a minimum time committment, but I also want to hear distinctive notes in that coverage. How do other people approach the balance of their subscriptions? Is anyone tilting one way versus the other for a reason? Aggregator feeds vs. individual site feeds?
