We’ve all had the problem. Hundreds of feeds and you never get them all read. I go through this ever couple of months or so. I end up with so many feeds in my Google Reader I just don’t get to them all. I start feeling guilty about it and wonder how others do it all. Some people I’ve talked to suggest cutting the number of feeds you read… and I hear that BUT then I feel like I might miss something important. The challenge is… how to manage your feeds.
I talked to Josh Bancroft a few weeks ago about the very thing. He’s got a great method he uses. I’ve adopted it and I have to say, it works really well. So what is it?
1) Use Google Reader for those feeds you REALLY will read.
2) Aggregate your other feeds and put them on your Netvibes.
So how do you aggregate your feeds? Well, you could:
- Use YahooPipes (Thanks Marshall K for teaching that at WordCampdx.)
- Use the following tools to get RSS feeds of keyword searches and then use Netvibes to browse the searches.
- Twitter search (search.twitter.com)
- FriendFeed
- Google Blog Search
- Ask.com blog search
- flickr.com/photo/tag
- Youtube tags
I have been following this process for the last couple weeks and I have to say, it works great! I read the feeds that I really want to read and need to read. I don’t feel like I’m missing out because I didn’t but my feeds just moved them to an optional location. I don’t have the guilt either because my Google Reader ONLY has those things I really want to read so I don’t see hundreds of feeds staring me in the face.
I can’t recommend this system enough. That said, do you have a better idea? How do you manage your feeds?
