23 Things Week 6: RSS and Google Reader

This week's activities were a great opportunity for me to revisit and clean up the RSS feeds I set up on Google Reader a long time ago.

I love the idea of keeping up with my favorite websites via RSS rather than visiting the individual sites themselves, but when I initially set up my RSS feeds I was a little overenthusiastic, and the result was an unmanageable bunch of feeds from sites I wasn't actually all that interested in keeping up with. So this week I had the opportunity to pare down my subscriptions, revisit the concept of using RSS, and add some sites that I actually do want to follow.

One of the subscriptions I added went into my "News" category - the feed from Slate.com, which I typically visit many times a day. The second was an addition to my "Library and Archives" folder - the blog for Library Thing, which is something I've been meaning to use more and would like to stay updated about. I especially like the fact that by using RSS, I can track what I've seen on these sites from home and elsewhere, and, as this week's video pointed out, cut down on unnecessary clicking.

Although I've been away from it for a long time, I can definitely see myself coming back to using Google Reader on a regular basis. But I think that the trick, for me at least, will be to do regular maintenance to keep the blogs and sites I follow to a minimum. Otherwise, I get an overwhelming backlog of information and end up feeling like I'm not making the most of this utility.

To keep that from happening, I decided to mark everything in Google Reader as "read" and start fresh - it's much easier to take in, now, and I will (hopefully!) be able to enjoy keeping up with new items as they come in from now on.