Managing Your Blog Feeds
May 25th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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Take a feed, leave a feed
I subscribe to a number of blog feeds via RSS, but I can’t possibly subscribe to all the interesting blogs out there. I quickly realized that if I kept subscribing to more feeds, I’d never keep up with them all.
I figured out that 20 blog feeds would be a reasonable number of subscriptions for me, so whenever I add a new feed, I delete an old one.
What have you done for me lately?
When I have to decide which feed to delete, I ask myself which blog on my list provides the least actionable material. Many feeds I’ve subscribed to have offered some amazing information and insights, but if I’m not getting ideas that alter my actions, those feeds are targets for deletion. I also consider the signal-to-noise ratio of each blog. What percentage of those posts give me actionable ideas? How much effort is required to find those gold nuggets?
My preference for actionable ideas is personal of course; most of my feeds are in the area of personal development, so I’m looking for ideas I can apply. The way you evaluate the quality of feeds will likely be different.
I’ve been doing this for months now, and it’s raised the average quality of blogs I subscribe to, so I’m getting more actionable information for less effort.
Trim the feed fat
Quality is more important than quantity. If you have too many feed subscriptions and want to cut back, then delete 2-3 feeds whenever you add a new one until you reach a manageable level. This will gradually trim the feed fat and increase the average quality of your feeds. You can also apply this idea to managing your web site bookmarks if you find your collection is growing too large.
May 25th, 2005 at 8:52 am
20. Wow. I’ve got 227 feeds in Bloglines. That’s some admirable restraint.
If I find a blog that looks good in the initial skim, I’ll add its feed to a Quarantine folder. It’s on probation until I decide that it’s worth moving to a permanent folder.
May 25th, 2005 at 9:53 am
Steve, can you give us a few blogs you find most interesting? I would really love to see those, since I’m really enjoing this one and I’m very interested in the field of personal developement. Thanks
May 25th, 2005 at 10:37 am
Sure… check out the list of blogs at Office Zealot’s GTD Zone. I think you’ll find some good ones there.
May 25th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
Wow, only 20 feeds. That sounds like a great plan, however I have 20 per category, and then I pick the category I want to read each day or so. I try to avoid some of the bigger ones (so no Slashdot for tech news, among others) as they have a lot of stuff you can catch on the news, and grab hold of feeds like this one that have original material you can’t find anywhere else. Thanks for sharing Steve!
May 25th, 2005 at 7:13 pm
In my post “On blogs and Boolean logic” I’m proposing a mechanism that may allow search engines for blogs to uncover really relevant entries judging not only by the authority of the blogger but also by the opinion of those who link to him.
May 25th, 2005 at 7:32 pm
Hey Steve, great post. It is so easy to get overwhelmed with sites and information. I really enjoy the community aspect of blogging and I think that means visiting a limited number of relevant sites and being an active participant.
I do have a question for you though. What is the best way to get others to link to your site? Obviously good content (as you always serve up) is a must. Is there any other popular techniques? I’ve noticed that you have a good number of other sites linking to you in your technorati profile. As a relatively new blogger, I would like to make my site the best it can be. Any recommendations would be appreciated.
John
May 25th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
John, I’d say the main thing is the quality of the content. But there is a lot you can do to build traffic beyond that. It’s too much to mention in a comment, but I recommend subscribing to Problogger and reading the archives, since that site has lots of great ideas for improving a blog and generating traffic. Much of what I’ve done to build traffic I learned from there and from similar sites that explore blogging as a business.
Content is still mainly what generates traffic for me — when people like a post, they’ll often mention it in their blogs too. Most of my new traffic has been coming from links on other blogs. Search engine traffic is still below 1% of total traffic, but it is gradually building.
May 26th, 2005 at 1:07 am
I am doing it the same as Steve. Currently, I have:
1) 10 blogs in Bloglines, where I watch the topics I am currently interested in
2) one subscription to google groups (43Folders),
3) I watch Descriptious (http://jonaquino.textdriven.com/descriptious/descriptious-populicious-cheyne.html) once a day – that’s great feed for emerging popular items.
I used to watch a lot of feeds before, but after some time I realised, that although the content was sometimes interesting, the actual benefit for me was rather small.
Regarding slashdot, my stance is just the opposite to Phils. For tech news, I read only slashdot, and that’s enough for me. I used to be subscribed to more tech-oriented feeds before, which allowed me to get certain news a bit sooner, but then I asked myself: Do I really need it?
June 3rd, 2005 at 8:14 am
Hey Steve
How about an OPML file of your feeds?
I’ll give you mine if you give me yours
blogroll: http://www.oneafrikan.com/blogroll/
OPML file: http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/opml.aspx?uid=14583&mid=1
I think Steve has a point, but if you watch more than one topic, I think 20 feeds is not enough… I think a good strategy is to know what you are realistically capable of doing in a day / reading, and then go from there. Also, I’ve found that it takes time to find the true nuggets – 43folders was a great find, this blog is a great find, but both probably took about 4 blogs / feeds for me to find them
Thanks again for great content Steve
Gareth
June 6th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
Managing Your Blog Feeds
Managing Your Blog Feeds