Declaring Reader Bankruptcy

I love my Google Reader.  Love it almost too much.  I have somewhere north of 60 active RSS feeds that it pulls from everyday. I've never been really good about managing these feeds however, the posts pile up, thousands of them at a time. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but it does clutter up my reading experience.  I've taken to reading the New York Times on my Kindle every morning, but still my Google reader feeds still serve as a primary source of news, especially on some more specialized interests like tech/gadgets and the legal world, but it's also my best and main source for taking in commentary. What I want to do is to use this source of news, knowledge and information better, I want to immerse myself more in the topics and writers who I really care about, and drop the ones who just add noise. I trust myself to innately make decisions about what's important for me, but it's hard to monitor those decisions when each feed has hundreds of unread posts, and each category has thousands. So as of last night I have declared Reader Bankruptcy ( concept stole from Fred Wilson's Email Bankruptcy, who's blog never goes unread)I'm going to monitor my reading for the next week or two.  At the end of that period, I'm going to cull the feeds that have the highest percent of their material unread. This is of course an on-going process, I hopefully will be adding and deleting feeds most constantly now. The quantitative goal i am setting for myself is to never have more than 100-200 unread articles on the Reader.  I plan on posting my trends data as this goes on to hopefully track this progress. In the same vein, I also want to begin expanding some of my feed selections so, if anyone out there has any feed recommendations, I would love to hear them.


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