Not that you can tell b/c I haven’t the ideal publication format for it yet now that I’m off Bloglines (might have a fix soonish, though), but I whacked my blogroll down by a significant margin over the last week or so. It’s still completely unmanageable, of course, sitting at 14,000+ unread items, but it’s better then it was.
This development is perhaps interesting in the context of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with someone who lamented the fact that feed readers/aggregators didn’t help them “find new feeds,” predicting that that would be a “killer feature” for a client. It may well be that that’s true, if the anemic numbers about RSS adoption in the general public are correct; certainly the Google Reader seems designed around a user who maintains a very few active feeds.
But for me, and – I’d bet – a lot of other high volume feed consumers, the killer feature wouldn’t be finding and adding new feeds, but pruning old ones. I’m constantly adding a feed here and a feed there, for a variety of reasons: they wrote something particularly compelling, so-and-so told me they were worth reading, they’re in a role that I should be tracking, or maybe they just linked to me and looked at least moderately interesting. The little things, as they have a tendency to do, alas, added up until I found myself with an unread count in the 40K range post holiday break.
Despite the fact that I’d recognized the problem quite a while ago, I did little to fix it until this past week (not that I in any way consider it “fixed”). Why? Because none of the readers I’ve used, including my current choice, provide me with anything in the way of abstracted metrics on my feeds. The task of cutting back my blogroll to some sort of manageable level is thus left to me, and when you have as many as I have (400+) it’s difficult to know where to begin. I’d love for FeedLounge, for example, to help me out by tagging feeds that haven’t been updated for a while with something like a ‘deadfeeds’ label. I’d also love to have some visibility into my browsing metrics: which feeds do I – whatever my intentions might be – simply not get around to reading? Which feeds, that aren’t already on my firstfeeds list – my high priority tag – should be there?
Much has been made of stats and metrics of late, what with some of the acquisitions (MeasureMap) and added features (Feedburner) – and maybe the feed readers can take a page from this. Because while I’m most certainly a feed reading edge case, I suspect there are a fair amount of folks out there that need more help cutting then they do adding.
P.S. One other interesting behavior possibly worth noting; I’ve begun implicitly delegating my feed tracking to a variety of folks I trust. Where it used to be when someone I trusted would mention a good feed, I’d simply add it to my reader without any further thought. These days, I never do that. Instead, I rely on them indirectly to keep me posted on their feeds of interest.
