technology

I subscribe to 112 RSS feeds (blogs, news, friends' social network contributions), which I guess is about average. I usually manage to go through all of them at least once a day (usually at 6AM for about half an hour).

Of course I do not read them all. So how do I choose?

A lot depends on the post title, at first. However, after a short while familiarity with the writer's style quickly lets me decide whether I will find it worthwhile to read an article or not.

We all have a limited range of topics we are interested in, or have something to say about and need to share. So I might be interested in topics A, B and C. You write about topics B, C and D. She writes about topics C, D and E.

I don't know about you, but I will only read your posts about topics B and C, and only her posts about topics C. Every now and then I check my Google Reader Trends, identify the feeds I have most often let flow through the river of news without clicking through, and prune extensively, aiming at having a manageable number of feeds, which for me is around 100.

I expect my readers to do pretty much the same with this website, and will not take it personally if after the nth post about some ridiculously named new overhyped application you will bide farewell and never visit again.

Don't come to me ranting that this modern way to access information selectively is evil and I am missing out on a lot of things, because that's what people have been doing forever with newspapers. The only difference is the technology that helps us parse via keywords and spare us what we do not want to see.

And anyway, if she ever were to produce a fantastic post about topic E, I am pretty sure I would hear about it somehow.