Regarding suggestion number one, a different approach to bundling feeds by subject/category, and one I’ve for found personally very effective in managing my 30-40 Bloglines feeds, is to arrange feeds by frequency of reading. I have folders for daily reading, two for weekly reading (one on Monday, one on Thursday), one for monthly (first Thursday in month), with the least valuable of my subscribed feeds consigned to a folder I’ll read if, as and when I have the time.

The process of setting up this structure forced me to assess the value of individual feeds, enabling me to eliminate weak feeds or those which merely served to provide information better provided by source. The outcome of the sifting is a prioritised folder arrangement which reflects and promotes effective time management.

This wasn’t my idea, but something I took from Nev and Dave’s Top 10 tips for effective blog reading – part 1: http://www.nevndave.com/2005/12/02/top-10-tips-for-effective-blog-reading-part-1/. Despite the comic appearance, I’ve found this to contain sound wisdom and would commend it to anyone looking for ideas to cope with the problem of excessive feeds. Certain tips may work better for some people than others (for example, my working days are not so regular that I can set a time for when I’ll read my blogs, as suggested in point 4).

Basically, it’s changing my attitude to my feeds. I realised, when doing some training for people on RSS itself, that I actually use my RSS feeds as a sort of enhanced bookmarks listing, rather than a pure “keeping up to date” resource. If I find a feed for something that _might_ be useful eventually, I’ll add it. That doesn’t mean I need to read everything that feed sends along. It’s just there as an aide memoire against the time that I _do_ need that resource.

And when I do, it’ll be there, nice and searchable. I can search only my own feeds, to find that resource I _know_ I saw six months ago. That’s something I’ve wished I could do with my bookmarks ever since the very first incarnation of the visual Web, and I _still_ can’t do it.

Bloglines, current reader of choice (because it synchs with NetNewsWire), has got a new toy called “Playlists”. This would be a good way to put the true daily reading (the comics, personal and cute and fuzzy sites, and the random news updates) into one place without losing their proper catalogue location, and to stave off the bizarre feeling of guilt as I head to Dilbert and studiously ignore the mounting postcount in UN Pulse (for eg only, of course!).

And I can do it now because should I need to know what’s happening in the UN Library, I can go there and catch up with as many posts as I like, or even search them, in one go.

Now _that’s_ the beauty of RSS. Not the instant information feed – any mailing list can still do that – but the ability to store the location of the site, and catch up, and search, all at one time. For a librarian, that’s gold; because we don’t generally need to know the information itself. We just need to know that it exists, and where to find it, quickly and easily.

OK, so maybe I’m just justfying my bizarre feeling of guilt at not being able to keep up with every piece of information that I feel relevant …