I’ve been mulling over the mess that my RSS subscriptions were/are/will ever be and I haven’t come to any conclusions about categories and how to consistently apply them to feeds. However, I have been busy renaming the feeds that I subscribe to — my feeds now begin with the person’s name. This reinforces the thought that I don’t read blogs, I read people.
So, wherever possible, I’ve changed the feed names to “First Name Last Name :: Vanity Site Name”. There are people who are shy (I know my name isn’t on this blog, but that’s because I’ve been too lazy to fix it), so I’ve left their feeds alone. I also haven’t touched magazines, news wires and aggregators.
I’m horrible about remembering names, so I hope this will help when folks ask who I’ve been reading. It should also help in conversations I have with non-web people. It’s a little weird to refer to a vanity site name in conversation because most of these are pretty strange (again, I know I’m guilty). Put it this way, it’s easier to say to my boss “I read this article by Cory Doctorow on copyright…” than to say “I read this Boing Boing entry about copyright…”
