Observations from a Google Reader Spring Clean

Feedreaders are for many working in blogging, or following the social media/ web 2.0 space a lifeline into keeping up with the latest news. And yet for many, a feedreader can be a beast that consumes time and isn’t always easy to manage.

I’d neglected doing a serious cleanup for a while, but decided that given I wanted to broaden my reading some more, I needed to undertake a spring clean. This included everything from dropping feeds, through to rearranging and creating new folders.

Here’s a couple of observations from the exercise

Organization is the key

I’ve always been big on grouping content into folders, but I’ve found over time that some content didn’t sit properly in existing folders, and other folders often duplicated interest areas. I found myself both consolidating folders and creating news ones.

If you’re not using folders yet, the key is grouping them in a fashion where you prioritize reading. In my case, I created a “first read” and “competitors” folder, and placed both of them at the top of my folders list. This is content I need to read first thing in the morning, and keep an eye on during the day.

I then refined a couple of others. Corporate, which use to be Google and Microsoft was expanded to include all company blogs I follow that were previously in other folders. Three folders covering tech/ web blogs became Web-A and Web-B.

You collect a lot of dead feeds

One thing that really surprised me was the amount of dead feeds I was still subscribed to. If you’re like me, you usually stay in the updated view, so feeds that aren’t updated just aren’t seen. One example: I was still subscribed to Robert Scoble’s Microsoft blog that hadn’t been updated since 2006! Picking up dead blogs saw my subscriber count drop by over 30 feeds.

Marginal blogs have to go, unless you have a strong personal connection

Over the years I’ve added blogs sometimes only because I’ve read something on the site I liked, but never really liked much more again. A lot of these blogs were in big folders, so I was use to glossing over them, but each blog I wasn’t really reading was adding time in my daily use of Google Reader, so a number of blogs had to go.

Likewise though there are some blogs I’ve stayed subscribed to because I know the person (either in RL or online), so I have a person connection and would like to keep up with them. In some of those cases, it wasn’t so much that I don’t like the content, in that it was rarely updated. In fact I was surprised by the number of infrequently updated blogs from people I would have expected to see more from. Ultimately put in a “personal” folder, they do little harm even if there is a marginal return from them in terms of regularly reading.

People who don’t redirect feeds are stupid

One thing that was strange in the dead feeds was the number of blogs that had changed address, and not bothered redirecting the feed. Although it’s not always an available option, it would have been with the majority of them. Telling readers in a post that they should sub to the new feed once is a quick way to lose subscribers. Old feeds should always be redirected to new feeds, out of respect for your readers, and because it makes complete sense; every subscriber counts, you don’t want to lose any.

Conclusion

Now I’ve had my spring clean it’s time to add new feeds, and the net result is I may end up reading more than before. But ultimately what I’ll be reading next week will be hopefully offer better value, and will be easier to manage.

I’d never encourage anyone to go mad and cut a pile of feeds, but prioritizing feeds and better managing them should be part of your regular mix…and I need to do this more often ?

Also if you’re subscribing to The Inquisitr and it’s too much for you, don’t forget we offer feeds per category so you can pick and choose what you want to read; that’s our commitment to making sure you get the best out of our content without having to deal with all of it.