October 08, 2004 | View Comments (102) | Category: Our Thoughts
Summary: Just wondering how many feeds you subscribe to. I am at 87 right now. I have issues.
Well I didn't get to finish my latest entry yet and since I have tortured everyone by making you read 4 long entries I figured I would take a Friday break and find out if everyone else is as psycho-obsessed with information as I am. It's pretty simple, I am wondering how many feeds you subscribe to. Personally, I am at 87 right now and I fear it will grow soon.
I think its time to trim it down again. Ahh, there is another good question that you can answer as well if you feel so obliged. What keeps you subscribed to a feed over time? Obvious answer is content, but not every site is updated all the time and sooner or later there might be too many sites that have quality content or some of the good content sites just stop pumping it out like they used to.
Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/355
Damn, you guys aren't helping my cause. I need you to be higher than me so I can at least pretend I am normal :-P
Scrivs (http://9rules.com/)
One hundred and twenty. And counting.
Now you can feel normal.
Amor Entintado (http://amorentintado.blogspot.com)
Haha, damn see that just makes me curious to see what you have and I don't. :-)
Scrivs (http://9rules.com/)
147 at the moment, and it pretty consistently stays between 160 and 130.
Ben (http://www.culann.com/)
293, listed at http://www.joegrossberg.com/links.html
If you "have issues", I'm ready for the loony bin.
Joe Grossberg (http://www.joegrossberg.com)
Right now, I have 101. I have found, at times, that these feeds have really distracted me from the real work that I should be doing. When that happens, I just close the Sage sidebar.
Don't become a slave to the content, Scrivs. Sure, it's nice and convenient to have it all come to you, but try to think of it like this: how many newspapers and/or magazines do you read each day? Why don't you subscribe to 87 of those?
Stu Schaff (http://www.devsyn.com)
66.
I guess I would have to say that constant updating is what keeps me happy, but the content is what keeps me coming back for more.
If you so care, here are the blogs I subscribe to.
Jeff Clark (http://www.vacantcanvas.com)
114. Scoble has said that he follows 1000+ feeds. That's just nuts. That would consume all my time. My 114 do that already, though I think some of them are now dead.
Greg (http://inside465.blogspot.com)
A quasimanagable 92, which is what's left from the 300 or so I subscribed to before. Hittin' Command-K -- the NetNewsWire "Mark All Read" command -- without second thoughts made me wonder if I really needed to subscribe to every Reuters and NYTimes feed...
And I'm glad this question didn't touch on the whole complete/partial feed debate buzzin' around the electronet as of late. (I suppose I shouldn't have touched on it, now that I think of it. Alas.)
Jason (http://electrospeck.com)
93-ish. Somewhat variable.
I'm using PulpFiction on OS X, which has some nice features for filtering and visually labeling feeds (yellow background for web-related, green for deals/products, etc.), so I can scan through my list at work and read the ones that pertain to work. That way I don't feel guilty about wasting my employer's time; I'm enriching my skills.
Of course, I also scan the headlines from Fark, and read the really really interesting stuff immediately... ;-)
Darkside
My Bloglines pulls a mere 56. But as people might know, I just have Bloglines to see what sites are updated - I prefer to read the post in its intended context.
Rob Mientjes (http://www.zooibaai.nl/b/)
Ummm... 17...?
Scrivs, 6 of those are you :-)
I guess I'ld like to read some more feeds. But, then again, most of the more important topics always end up trickling down into one of my current feeds. I just keep the feeds that I really enjoy reading.
Jason Marble (http://afriendapart.com)
159
doesnt help when css galleries keep increasing ;)
i use bloglines and classify them nicely. that helps.
also, all new feeds go into a "waiting room" folder for a trial period. helps in trimming.
Chugs (http://chugsdesigns.com)
80 - Total Feeds
14 - Comics (Achewood, Qwantz, Dilbert)
12 - Misc. (friends, clients)
4 - Technology (/., Wired)
50 - Design and Web tech
Ya, I am ill and overwhelmed: a feed slave. At least 100 new posts every morning, I read them all lest I miss the latest big argument, trend or helpfull tip.
Feeds were supposed to free me from surfing 70 sites, of which 10 were updated. Now I'm reading 100 design-related headlines, but half talk about the weather or vacation. Also time consuming are redundant posts: a good article appears and every second post I read simply regurgitates the link.
But I think the real problem is that I've raised the bar so high in terms of my blog subscription quality that I can now actually narrow it down to the cream of the crop. If I do miss something cool I didn't subscribe to, maybe I should trust to hear about it from the "cream feeds."
Jeff Werner (http://jeffwerner.ca)
Around 50.
And personally I think these feeds things, whilst they are very useful, are killing the art of surfing. Between my feeds, blogrolls etc, I often have to make myself, FORCE myself, to s u r f... you know, click to a site, then from that site to another one I've never been to before.. and so on..
Remember that? ;-)
Gordon (http://www.gordonmclean.co.uk/)
I don't read them much, prefer to use blo.gs to just tell me when stuff is updated, I'm old school like that. ;)
I've got about 60.
Keith (http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/)
30 through blo.gs, though there are others that I check that either don't ping blo.gs (the horror!) or that I just haven't added to my watch list yet. I think it's time to go on a crusade to get everyone to ping blo.gs... ;)
Ryan Brill (http://www.ryanbrill.com/)
I'm looking at about 50 on my list. Unfortunately, the main gaming community I'm part of is one where mostly no one knows how to use HTML, knows what CSS is, and would dare syndicate news so a person doesn't have to visit their site =( At least my site and a couple of English, German, and Japanese ones do syndicate, but one can always ask for more RSS feeds =)
Chris Fritz
I only have about 30 feeds that I'm subscribed to. Two of them are from you Scrivs (whitespace and FG). I tend to read blog sites for a while before I start using their feeds; if the content appeals to me for longer than a week or two then I let the author invade my RSS reader. I find this helps keep the clutter out of my reader.
Vinnie Garcia (http://blog.vinniegarcia.com/)
273 feeds via Bloglines but read through the new sync feature in FeedDemon which is very nice.
Ken Schafer (http://www.schafer.com)
Well, I guess I can feel somehow normal with 127 feed with bloglines... I know I'm information obsessed... half an hour ago I just got 5 books from Amazon...
Nelson (http://www.webstudio.cl/blog)
I have 91, but about a dozen of those are Mac news or the NY Times, which I don't read carefully. The rest are weblogs, which I follow pretty closely.
John Zeratsky (http://johnzeratsky.com)
25 at work. 8 of them are parts of the 9rules network (bmt, 9r, ws, fg + comments, + fg editor forum)
others... google blog, gizmodo, asterisk (all work/no play), boingboing, mefi, monochrom, milbertus, inmyexperience (which hasn't updated in months but is on there anyway), ipodlounge, bethcurtis.net (a coworker's photo gallery) and a few traditional news sites whose feeds I almost never even look at.
And AMEN Gordon. I've noticed that the web is alot less fun since I started using two particular technologies -- tabbed browsers that allow bookmarking groups (one click opens all my web comic sites, another all the blogs, another all the sites I maintain, another all my webmail accounts, etc), and RSS... I almost never just surf the web anymore unless I'm researching something specific.
I kinda miss just getting lost because I couldn't remember the address of a site I wanted to hit, so I googled it, found 10 others that sounded interesting but weren't related and surfed them all and went from there to there to there...
Same problem with dictionaries and encyclopedias... with a paper dictionary, I'll usually go to look up one thing, read 5-10 more while looking for it and several more after and learn something new... online... I just type and instantly find what I want... which is great if I'm in a hurry, but doesn't expose me to the unexpected.
JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)
391. *wonders how he manages to sleep...
My groups are broken down into the following:
Tech
Mac
Politics
IA | HCI | UCD
Web
Forums
Misc
Craigslist
Marketing | Branding
Humor | Comics
RSS | Blogs
I've gotten REALLY good at the whole routine:
1. Scan like crazy
2. Liberally hit "Mark All as Read"
3. Catch up on reading on the couch with the Powerbook
4. Rinse and repeat
Chris Moritz (http://www.campbell-ewald.com/)
142 and growing at a VERY fast rate, reading weblogs in two languages is very time consuming :D
Hermann (http://www.theragingche.com/blog/)
125 -- but this post got me into the idea of deleting some more.
I guess I stay subscribed to feeds that offer up interesting conversations to follow. I usually don't find how-to's very interesting anymore, more theory ideas on design or good practices (web and print) keeps me enticed on those subjects. I skip over new launch announcements a lot more now, and I subscribe to sites a lot more that have news information that is thorough and detailed, rather than:
"New _____ has been released here _______"
which a lot of my older ones where basic announcements with no other form of opinion or commenting.
Brady J. Frey (http://www.dotfive.com)
I kinda miss just getting lost because I couldn't remember the address of a site I wanted to hit, so I googled it, found 10 others that sounded interesting but weren't related and surfed them all and went from there to there to there...That's the whole reason I keep my feeds to a minimum. I still love the feeling of being lost on the web. :)
Vinnie Garcia (http://blog.vinniegarcia.com)
mark@agnes:~$ wc -l .snownews/urls
217 .snownews/urls
However, i also have some 'useful' feeds. This is because i decided never to check a resource for updates again, since scripts can do that for me and produce rss. So i also have a script which fetches relevant announcements made on our local BlackBoard. Another example will be a feed for my incoming irc dcc directory, since i don't always notice it when someone sends me a file, and this way i just get an update and don't need to check.
Mark IJbema (http://markijbema.nl)
62 or so for me. I am continually pruning to stay under 70 or I would never get any work done.
http://bloglines.com/public/boxofjack/
I think kottke should really count as 6 blogs or something. Every time I visit, I end up clicking 5 other links there.
Jack (http://boxofjack.com)
~153 and growing :-(
Mostly all Mac and Web Development specific.
Ryan J. Bonnell (http://www.ryanjbonnell.com/)
87 doesn't seem like a lot. I've currently got 101 on bloglines and could easily add a bunch more. Only half the content people post is any relevant to what I want to read (ie: I don't really care about reading politics on a design or programming blog so I can just skip over those. :)).
I've found myself checking recent posts on weblogs.com and del.icio.us just to find more blogs. :D
oh, I could be addicted...
Jonathan Snook (http://www.snook.ca/jonathan/)
248 through Bloglines. About half of those are custom searches that only check occasionally. I manage the material worth saving with Furl.
Lee (http://www.leepotts.com/tehi)
Currently 154 in NetNewsWire. Methinks I need to do a little bit of pruning.
Mike (http://prolumina.com/~mlarocque/)
48 (web)design related, and then 10 about copyright/drm issues and politics.
Jacob Rask (http://www.jacobrask.net)
26 Livebookmarks
Practicly all webrelated. Still wondering when webcomic's will have them (like reallife, penny arcade...etc)
AkaXakA (http://akaxaka.gameover.com)
over 200 - I'm not sure as I can't see an easy way to count them (nope, not going to do it manually, sorry! :))
But!
I rarely delete feeds, instead I group them.
I have a group of 'read these', I have a group of '2nd pri', and so on; 'if bored' mostly just gets marked read and not read at all; I briefly scan the subject line.
Saves me time, but lets me stay in touch :)
Lea de Groot (http://elysiansystems.com/)
exactly 50 on bloglines :)
try and keep it about that amount or i cant keep up.
Eddie Sowden (http://e26.co.uk)
158. 157 too many. Where is my "Items from the Web you would like" Super Feed?
Paul Watson (http://stormfront.typepad.com/)
190 or so. And some other sites which I prefer to read in my browser. About 200 total.
Kevin Francis (http://denial.loose-screws.com/)
100 is a magic number. I try to stay below it, with a margin, so I can still subscribe to the odd site that totally catches my interest, or where the author writes something I can really connect to.
I find it tough to decide which to weed out, though. I think I need an aggregator which has a hibernation feature, so I can alternate the (often higher volume) feeds that I don't want to read all the time, but don't want to loose either.
Sencer (http://www.sencer.de)
306.
I think I need help (though I have started to weed).
No wonder I'm not posting much on my own site.
Yvonne Adams (http://wearenotsheep.com)
Right now, 776, using Newsgator with all entries in a single folder grouped by feed. When I'm in a hurry I'll simply delete all the entries of any non-crucial feed. I'm one of those people not satisfied with the current state of subscription management in newsreaders!
Olivier Travers (http://www.oliviertravers.com/)
Art&Design: 6
Comics: 7
Misc: 8
Games: 17
Webdesign: 13
So it makes 51 feed. I'd say 10/12 aren't worth the packets anymore and another 10 is just some form of internet echoes.
Vanhalle Jean-Christohe
63 via Bloglines and also FeedReader, I agree that some sites publish way too much eg the BBC news I hardly ever read that 300 plus daily, Sometimes I like to flick though it just to catch up.
It depends on the feed really, if its web-design realated I like to read new stuff CSS ideas in-depth articles, but if its dilbert I can read strips one after another.
Tom
51 Often viewed
18 Sometimes
15 Seldom
9 Never.
I haven't looked at Sometimes for weeks.
51 is too many. Some have a lot of posts, and few I read, I'd like to see less. In the next fortnight I may knock some from Often to another category.
"Never" helps me not to subscribe again to a feed that I rejected before.
Mike Gale (http://www.decisionz.com)
210 on bloglines. I started out just subscribing to anything and everything. I'm starting to remove feeds slowly though.
John Serris (http://phonophunk.phreakin.com/)
174 for me, but I'm in the process of pruning them
Richard@Home (http://richardathome.no-ip.com)
90 after a spring clean - I'm going to drop some more I think.
Sam Newman (http://www.magpiebrain.com/)
I've 221 feeds at the moment (my Bloglines). Got some del.icio.us feeds in there too.
Cheah Chu Yeow (http://blog.codefront.net/)
i'm not sure about how to get a feed anyways? is it the same as News RSS? can someone tell me how to do it? i really want to be able to keep all of the stuff i read in one place.. rather than going through my bookmarks everyday.. thanks!
Jason Wang (http://www.programer.name)
I count 75 but that includes 2 from my site which I keep in my list to monitor for problems. So I guess that makes 73.
waylman (http://achinghead.com)
Jason, RSS feeds are the files that you can find on any blog that allow you to see when a site is updated. Look at the sidebar on this site and you will see what I am talking about. This entry should give you an idea of some good RSS readers to checkout.
Scrivs (http://9rules.com/)
89, but like 5 of them are my own just to make sure they're working correctly.
There's a few that I just skim headlines on but for the most part I read everything when I get the time.
Brian Behrend (http://www.brianbehrend.com/)
394. Actually I found it quite liberating once I passed 200 - now there's NO way I'll be able to actually read everything everyday - so I won't try (which I did below 200).
I read a few of my groups (150+ feeds in total) thoroughly and monitor the rest - and once in a while I go through that other half, reading or just marking them as read. I like the fact that the good stuff is in there somewhere - if I need anything there's a good chance I'm already subscribed to a relevant feed.
pollas (http://pollas.dk)
I have colected these comments together and sex-ified them a little and this is what I came up with. Also have some statistics and such like on my blog entry. Enjoy!
Eddie (http://e26.co.uk)
After feeling rather left out, I subscribed to a few more sites I visit regularly, now I'm at 26.
Darryl Millar (http://surreal.hydra3.org)
via bloglines:
20 linkblogs
8 edublogs
9 misc feeds including vanity google alert (for returning to articles i have commented on)
via blo.gs:
54 beautiful blogs worth visiting
total: 91
no kottke, zeldman, shea or scrivs on any list. If any of those guys say anything extraordinary I'll hear about it through someone else. ;-) i like to listen to the little guys, even though i like looking at the big guys.
Adam Bramwell (http://www.octapod.org/adam)
54, if I counted correctly. See for yourself:
www.bloglines.com/public/GabrielPM
Gabriel Mihalache (http://www.individualism.ro/)
A manageable 2 dozen here. They're mostly web dev or design related and I plan to add more music related ones.
Jeremy (http://www.loudstyle.com/blog)
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#1
0 feeds, but about 50+ blo.gs
huphtur (http://www.huphtur.nl/)