Google Reader is the primary source of information for most of my blogs. I track nearly 400 blogs in Reader, which help supply links and content for my various sites and also allow me to keep up with my own sites.
A while back, Google Reader added a “Discover >>” link to their site, which provides recommendations to add to your reading list. I didn’t use it much for a while, but now it’s become a daily stop for me.
The recommendations page lists about 15 blogs that it thinks you might like, based on your current reading habits. Each blog shows the number of current subscribers (in Google Reader and iGoogle only), the title, a short blurb and the average number of posts/week.
At first I was disappointed that I couldn’t view more than a single page of recommendations, but I’ve developed a nice workaround. Each day, I pull up the recommendations to see what’s in there (see the image on the left). Then I simply deal with all of them. If a blog sounds useful to one of my niches, I’ll subscribe. If not, I’ll click the “no thanks” link to make it go away. Once the list is empty, it’ll stay empty for the rest of the day. The next morning, though, it’s back with new items!
The thing I need to get better about is cleaning out blogs that don’t post information that is useful to me. I do my best to unsubscribe, but I’m usually trying to dig through a lot of items so I just plan to “get back to it later”.
If I see an item that is blog-worthy, I either blog about it right then (if it’s time sensitive) or give it a star. When things cool down in the evenings, I pull up my starred items list and work through it. As I blog about each item, I remove the star and it goes away.
Any other tips for dealing with a large number of feeds?
Just let them go. Life’s short. I look at it as reading the newspaper, if it’s there I do and if I miss a day – so what!
I place feeds in the library on my site so people can go read them there. This helps them find good new feeds but dealing with a lot of feeds of your own is like dealing with emails.
I think its good that we only get a page of choices! No one can keep up with everything.
I like your blog by the way and what you post about. I’m glad I came to visit.