Okay, it's 9:30pm at night and you just got home from a dinner. You worked a full day and did some reading when you have a chance but you have a few hundred items to get through if you want to stay on top of today's news. Do you: 1 - Read it all. [ RSS is a critical way to stay on top of news! ] 2 - Poach the best, read it, can the rest. 3 - Save it for tomorrow. 4- Read the work stuff, delete the fun stuff. (Over 4b, the converse.) 4 - Mark all as read. [If it's important you'll find out about it sooner or later.] Any replies would be greatly appreciated.

Note- this has been sitting in drafts for a few weeks (oops), I'll have another update very soon...  New- blogs added

• DomainTools Blog- A great blog about domain names. I had to buy a number of domains this week (still have to figure some out) and I remembered just how interesting domaining is. It's like real estate for internet people...
• Coworking Community Blog- I want to get into some of these coworking dates. This seemed like the right place to start.
• Laptoping- It's a cool site about laptop news. I've been reading it on and off for a long time and finally decided to pull the trigger.
• Grub Street- NYMag's food blog- it's the best there is. Another one that I have been reading for some time and finally subscribed to.
• VIA sites- VIA (like the processor/motherboard guys) keeps opening up web properties to talk about their gear. They get good writers and post about some pretty cool stuff. Nothing insanely amazing, but definitely worth checking out. They don't post a whole lot, so I keep subscribing. Some sites are Technovoyance, Green Lounge, VIA Galleries, Ultramobile Life, UMPC Portal and EPIAcenter. I'm not sure if VIA official owns then or what. Something I need to look into...
• JKKmobile- Another one that I have checked out from time to time.

Hot- sites that have been awesome lately

• Game Life- Wired's gaming blog. It gets gaming news, filters out all the crap and gives you what you want. Perfect for someone who is intersted by does not have the time to read 40 posts a day from Kotaku, most of which are about cakes that look like game characters.

Not- sites that have been disappointing lately

• Get Rich Slowly- I really enjoyed this ans some other financial blogs for some time, but after a few months it's just the same stuff over and over again. There are LOTS of links to book and tips on saving money, but in the end it's the same stuff in a different form.
• Eater- It's good, but Grub Street is way better.

Removed- unsubscribed

• Adobe Blogs- Cool in theory, but rarely anything too interesting, at least from my perspective. Maybe if I used Adobe products a primary tool for my job (even though I still use multiple ones everyday) it would be more interesting.
• /Message, Stowe Boyd- I just have not been reading it lately...

Trends- So I've been doing some pretty serious reading lately, though I have I have been much more liberal with the "mark all as read" button, this is especially true with my business/financial reading. - Previous RSS Watch.

Trends:

From your 150 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 17,857 items, starred 0 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.  (taken after feed removals)

New

• Mahalo Daily- Against my better judgement I signed up because the into video was funny. So I'll give it a shot. Why is there commenting? And, I don't see what this has to do with search or even Mahalo.

Hot

• Y Combinator Startup News- This is an incredible feed that I have been on since day 1. It's not just startup news- it more like a quick and dirty wrap up of the day's tech news. Kind of like Digg with the junk and without the comments.

Not

• Direct2Dell- This was pretty solid for a few weeks, but they have not been putting out anything interesting lately.
• Boing Boing Gadgets- It's cool, but it's missing something compared to Boing Boing. Plus they cover a lot of stuff that other sites have AND when they have something really cool, Boing Boing's feed (which I get anyway) will link to it.
• Gigaom- Seems like these guys are slowing fading away. They had a good run, but lots of the info you can get elsewhere. I do like NewTeeVee and WebworkerDaily though.

Removed-

• Seeking Alpha Select- I used to read through all of Seeking Alpha and it was just taking up too much time. I created a Seeking Alpha Select feed that combined the topics I was most interested in into one feed and gave it a shot for a few months, but this is still too much (over 100 items a day) even at a fast skim. Finally unsubscribed- I'll read 24/7 Wall Street and Blogging Stocks instead.
• Buzz Machine- I tried it for a number of months, but it had to go. The posts are too long and too frequent. Plus, whenever there is something really great, enough people link to it that I won't miss it.
• Feld-The whole VC thing was interesting for awhile, but
• AVING USA- They used to get cool stuff really early, now it seems like everything I see there I already read about someplace else.
• Zoho Blog- It was pretty cool for a while, but they have not had much news lately and I am too tied into Google tools at the moment to leave.
• Memeorandum- It's techmeme.com but for politics. It is a good feed to glance at from time to time, but given the signal/noise ratio (considering my interest in politics) it does not make sense to keep it on.
• 1938 Media- This was funny for awhile, but hasn't held my attention lately. They stopped talking about web stuff and started going downhill. Hopefully when good stuff does show up, people will link to it.
• Profy- They have some good stuff now and then, lately all their best stuff I have been able to find someplace else, generally the day before. If I already read TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb (I think that's where the slash goes) then where does Profy fit in?
• High Scalability- Incredibly cool, but it's mainly just links to things that I don't deal with very often. Maybe I should have my dev team read it...

To the fallen sites- nothing personal. I originally started with RSS in order to optimize my reading and while that last for some time, it has spiraled out of control and something that I used to really enjoy and that saved me a lot of time is not somewhat of a burden. Wrap-up: Added: 1 Removed: 9 A few more weeks like this and I might get my RSS reading under control.

I have not done an RSS Watch in some time (Aug 29) so this is a big one... Trends- supply by Google

From your 157 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 18,966 items, starred 0 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 1 items.

New- added since the last RSS Watch

• Adam Bosworth's Weblog- it was recommended to me. no new posts yet...
• APML Updates- the attention tracking people. this is totally cool stuff
• Blogs@Intel- they're hit and miss, but some really good stuff there
• Carrypad- mobile tech from the the UMPCportal guys, but for MIDs and internet tablets
• EeeUser.com- i can't wait for the Eee PC, I have been devouring all information about it
• Internet Tablet Talk- these guys broke the Nokia N810 story today. Looks pretty solid
• Logic Supply Blog- a blog from everyone's favorite mini-itx store
• Royal.Pingdom- Pingdom's blog. These guys have a great service
• TechnoVoyance- VIA's new blog

Hot-

• Media Temple Blog- these guys have been posting a lot because they have been having a lot of problems over there. They have been very transparent about it and have done a great job of keeping us updated. I don't rely on them for much more than this blog (no email luckily) so the problems haven't hit me, but it's stuff I want to know.
• Phoronix- these guys have been making a lot of headlines lately. They own digg...
• Mobility Site- if you want mobile news and only want to read one site, this would be a good one to pick

Not-

• Boy Genius Report- it's still great, but he's not the one breaking all the news or getting all the exclusives lately...
• Valleywag- it's been really bad lately, but help might be on the way...

Dropped-

• Nothing. (I know, I can't keep picking up feeds without dropping some, but it is very hard to let go. I need to do some serious pruning.)

New- added since the last RSS Watch

• Jeremy Liew- LSVP- another VC blog, but this one is actually pretty interesting
• Wired's Game|Life- its like Epicenter for gaming, very good.
• Gadgets.BoingBoing- you just can't say no to Boing Boing
• Bug Labs

Hot-

• Gridskipper- I am a big fan of their Paris feed... It's a must for travelers
• Gamasutra Articles- great gaming content. They look deep into gaming the way few others bother to.

Not-

• 1938media- complete implosion over there. The content is nothing like what we were seeing, and enjoying, a few months ago.
• Some big names have not been blogging much lately, like Calacanis, Scoble, Rubel...

Deleted-

• Anything But iPod

All told, my blog reading has not been great over the past few months. It's probably due to it being August, a month when everyone goes on vacation and in many places in the US it is distractingly hot. I'm looking forward to September and the start of the tech season when hopefully some of the blog I read (and this blog) will start to pick up.

I was going to post this on the blog, but threw it up on XYZ instead. Here is is again... 8 easy ways to optimize your RSS reading. They have helped me out a lot, but they're my ideas. Hopefully they can help out some other people and allow you to either read more or spend less time reading things that don't interest you. From the article:

1. Use a good RSS reader A quality RSS reader is your best (and pretty much your only) tool for optimized reading. Many people agree that Google Reader is the best option here, but it is not the only option. A solid reader will give you all the tools you need to organize your feeds as well as to quickly add and remove them. Online readers are generally the way to go because you can read from anywhere, but the advantage of desktop tools is that you can limited how often they refresh so you don't spend too long reading. A good idea it so only allow feeds to refresh ever few hours so you don't spend too much time reading. 2. Delete Duplicates If you're interests tend towards the mainstream there are probably multiple sites that cover the topics you want to read about. It's great to get more than one point of view and not miss any news, but if two sites are very similar you can save a lot of time by dropping one. For example, if you like video games you might read Kotaku (average 44.4 posts/day) and Joystiq (average 22.3 posts/day), both are great sites, but there is a lot of overlap there. By cutting one you can get almost all the news you would by reading both and still save time. 3. Go Mobile Lot's of devices can handle RSS now so if you are on the road a lot it makes sense to get some of your reading done then. Whether you have a BlackBerry, a Nokia N800, or just a laptop, there are ways to get to your RSS feeds so you can get some reading out of the way. The best way to do this is to find a way so sync your readers so that you don't have to mark items as read later, but even if you can't sync up, reading on the run will save time later. Google Gears can be very helpful with this. 4. Subscribe to Tags or Topics With many blogs you can subscribe to tags or topics instead of reading the whole blog. This way you can read what you are interested in and forget the rest. An example of this is on Seeking Alpha where you can subscribe to sectors or themes that interest you instead of getting all their posts every days through the main RSS feed. This will cut back on the total feeds you read and limit posts to what interests you. 5. Make Pipes Yahoo Pipes is an incredible tool for any dedicated RSS reader. Using this you can customize feeds by integrating them or pulling out the posts you want and skipping the rest. One of the Pipes I made searches though a number of tech job boards and only returns the jobs in New York. 6. Use Google Blog Search Another way to focus only on the topics that you want is to use Blog Search. Here you can create an RSS feed that shows all the items from around the web with a certain search string in it. For example, if you want to only know about a certain cell phone, you don't have to read a dozen cell phone and mobile blogs everyday, you can just have a dedicated feed with those items. Here is one for the HTC Vogue. 7. Focus on Personal Blogs, Not News Organizations This is obviously going to vary based on your interests, but if you focus on personal blogs instead of large organizations you will have to deal with fewer posts and less repeats, plus you won't have to deal with short breaking news announcements (that you will hear about anyway) or reworded press releases. Then check out your favorite sites once or twice a day to get the rest. Sites like Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, and Google News are great for this. 8. Follow the Trends Some tools (like Google Reader) offer a trends tool that will let you get a better feel for what you are reading and what you are skipping. By using this you can begin to prioritize your feeds and delete the ones that you are not reading. If a site seems interesting, but you are only reading a small percentage of their posts, you should try to figure out how you can isolate that content or get the information from a site that is more to your liking.

Keeping an eye on RSS so you don't have to! This is the fourth installment of the RSS Watch, so be sure to check out the older ones to see the progression of my RSS reading. Trends:

From your 134 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 19,838 items, starred 7 items, and shared 0 items.

So, yeah, I've been doing a lot of reading. I have been reading a lot less financial stuff lately and focusing more on mobile and gaming, as well as my normal tech/internet stuff. New- recently added

• DS Fanboy- I love the DS and these guys do a very good job of keeping up on DS news without posting 100 times a day.
• Mobility Site: Lots of mobile news. Mainly press releases, but they do a good job of catching everything that I want to see.
• Verbal Spew- One of the guys from IGN. He had some great articles on Chronotrigger so I stuck with it.

Hot- feeds I have really been liking lately

• Journals.Ars- Great coverage of what's happening in tech. Top-notch stuff.
• DS Fanboy- Really solid E3 coverage without overdoing it. This site is a must-read for DS fans.

Not- ones that have not been great and/or I have been thinking of dropping

•  Gizmodo- Maybe it's just me but it seems like Engadget does a way better job.
• AVING World- This was cool for awhile, but lately the site has been really slow to load and they having been bringing me anything that is particularly cool.
• Gigaom- I haven't found anything too interesting here lately. Anything good generally gets linked to by Techmeme or something like that so this one is on thin ice. I'm definitely keeping Web Worker Daily though.

Dropped- not longer subscribed to

• Unclutterer- It's a cool idea and reducing clutter is a worthwhile goal, but they failed to keep me interested. I think the should focus more on reducing clutter on my computer, not in my kitchen
• Uncrate- Seemed like a cool idea, but most of the products are ones I already found out about from other sites and the short posts are very advertise-y.

--- Previous RSS Watch- Third Edition

If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: arghyle, c/o FeedBurner, 549 W Randolph, Chicago IL USA 60661

This is the last line in each email that Feedburner sends out when you subscribe to a feed via email.  Sounds like a joke- but I think they are serious. I have Feedburner send me my posts so I can get to them from Gmail and also so I have an archive of them (which, for some reason, is reassuring). But anyway, at the end of every email they say how you can subscribe via RSS "if your inbox is too full" or you can unsubscribe with a link, but then they throw in the postal mail thing, pretty weird. I may try it, just for kicks. I wonder what the turn around time is...

I know you have all been waiting for this post for a long time. It's another fascinating look at my RSS feeds... New- recently added

• http://blog.pmarca.com - This is the blog to read right now. You can't miss it b/c everyone is linking to it. Even if they weren't, it would be worth checking out.
• Hot Cluster- Added today. It's about utility computing and it's applications
• Amazon Web Services Blog- I'm am kinda obsessed with learning about EC2 right now
• UMPC Portal- I started reading these guys every day to keep up with Computex news, it's good enough to keep around
• Marshall Kirkpatrick links- It's his link blog and the link's to his blog posts. Pretty cool so far

Hot- feeds I have really been liking lately

• http://blog.pmarca.com- wow- look at these numbers... best blog launch, ever?
• Arghyle Seeking Alpha Select- Yahoo Pipes finally fixed their formatting issues so I can read a number of great feeds from Seeking Alpha rolled into one feed.
• Valleywag- It's so wrong in so many ways, but I can't stop reading. It's fascinating how they just say whatever they want because of anonymous sources that may or may not exist. I think some sort of implosion is imminent... They caught Scoble's attention yesterday...
• Consumerist- this blog is turning out to be one of the best sites on the internet. They possibly saved my vision by alerting me to a defect with my contact lens solution (my doctor didn't bother to call), they offer a lot of advice to people concerning the products/services we use everyday, and they are an incredible resource for consumers who often have no other place to turn to. A lot of what they post is the worst case scenario that happens to one person, but it's great that these things are out in the open. And their "confessions of a [insert company] rep are fantastic.

Not- ones that have not been great and/or I have been thinking of dropping

• Gigaom Network- This is Gigaom, Webworker Daily, NewTeeVee and Found+Read. I like WWD, but they have been off their game lately. As for the other ones- Found+Read is turning out to be another middle-of-the-road site (like GigaGamez) and Gigaom is losing it's edge as well. NewTeeVee may end up being the standout here as far as unique and original content, but you have to be really interested in online video to get the most out of it.

Dropped- not longer subscribed to

• http://chris.pirillo.com/- I gave it a shot for a few weeks, and there are gems here and there, but most of the posts were just not for me...

From Google Trends:

From your 126 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 19,636 items, starred 9 items, and shared 1 items.

-- Previous- RSS Watch 2

Here is the second installment of my periodic look at my RSS feeds. New- recently added

• 1938media- I have been watching 1938 for some time now, but finally added them to my feed. The videos are really funny, but also topical.
• Seeking Alpha Select- My select feeds from Seeking Alpha, in a Yahoo Pipe. Doesn't work right in Google Reader (yet) because of a problem with Pipes, but they are working on it. Was supposed to be fixed yesterday...
• Unclutterer- A new blog about personal organization. Worth checking out
• AVing.net- Pretty cool site about gear from Asia. Having been reading for a long time, finally subscribed.

Hot- feeds I have really been liking lately

• Wired Epicenter- Awesome blog. Great posts, lots of interesting content. My favorite right now.

Not- ones that have not been great and/or I have been thinking of dropping

• The Simple Dollar- This is a blog I normally really like. Lately I have had trouble relating to it. A lot of the posts are about taking really extreme, and sometimes impractical, measures to save money...

Killed- subscription cancelled

• Seeking Alpha's full feed- Just too much to handle. The Select one (see above) is much better for my needs, especially once it works properly in Reader.

- Last week's RSS Watch

Some personal observations from the RSS feeds I read every day... New- recently added

• Gamasutra- great site, the best gaming-related writing on the web
• Pocketables- they don't update very often, but they look at a lot of cool gear
• comScore- not a lot of content, but they do a great job with what they post. lots of interesting firefox vs. IE stuff so far

Hot- feeds I have really been liking lately

• O'Reilly Radar- very good blog, lots of quality insights, very reasonable frequency
• Jupiter- Mike Gartenburg do an excellent job. Very pertinent postings and they keep up on the news

Not- ones that have not been great and/or I have been thinking of dropping

• Seeking Alpha- Too many postings (averaging 64.4 posts a day, that is with the weekends) and they now they do partial feeds, plus lots of duplicate content
• Kotaku- way too much posting, averaging 44 posts a day, not as good as Joystiq
• Found+Read- Om's new site, not much content, not very interesting when it comes. this one is going the way of gigagamez...