I’m just listening to this week’s /Talkshow, which features Leisa Reichelt talking to Stowe Boyd. I’ve been following Leisa’s blog Disambiguity since I came across her Ambient Intimacy concept, and been following her Twitters. O…

I’m pretty amazed that you manage to only follow 30 feeds. I must be subscribed to hundreds (yours having been added to my reader just a few days ago!). I’d be interested in your opinion of endo… I use Vienna on OS X, and GreatNews on Windows. I do find having an offline newsreader useful, since it means I can catch up on my reader when I’m on a plane or train, for example. There’s an issue though, that I see the same things twice, once on Windows at work and once on OS X at home… and that wouldn’t happen if I used a web-based reader.

The problem I’ve found is the volume of interesting stuff – like you, there are a wide variety of topics I follow – and the desire to comment on or follow up on the entries. That’s the essence of good participation in the blogosphere, and I constantly feel guilty that I don’t comment more often.

You might like to check out my Quicksand of Web 2.0 post, too… and that was written before I got into Twitter… :-)

I’m actually getting bored with some of my feeds, so that’s been helpful. I think once I start to focus on a particular niche, things will get easier from there. of course Rome wasn’t built in a day, so I don’t expect to have the perfect mount of all the best feeds in that amount of time either. ;-)

Keep on blogging!

That said, I guess I’m still in the feed fine-tuning stage. Adding feeds, removing the ones I don’t read. Eventually, I’ll have it pinned down. At this point, I think I’ll have to set aside a whole day each week just to go through the feeds and flag the articles I want to read again. And maybe another day to work on the flagged articles. How many days in a week? I wish the Beatles were right about eight days.

Thanks for your insight. I hope to attract the kinds of visitors who will take advantage of the comments feature to share their insight with all of us.

I think part of the solution is considering that a lot of the info is redundant, so if you drop one feed, chances are whatever you missed will be mentioned in another feed you still subscribe to.

It’s also a given that many people will cast a very wide net at the beginning, trying to keep up with so many feeds and sites that finding the last number of Pi will seem like a realistic achievement in comparison. But as time goes on, I think you’ll begin to prioritize and sacrifice those feeds that don’t turn out to be as useful as you hoped.

I think that’s how veteran bloggers got started. they either blogged or they didn’t, spending most of their time tweaking and building their database of feeds until it eventually evolved into something they could personally handle. Far from being done overnight, I suspect this is something that spanned several years.

Personally, I have over 50 feeds, which was cut down from ohh, maybe 500. :-D but I’ll be cutting down even more as I’ve noticed that I tend to completely skip over some feeds.

Finally, I think the important thing is to focus on drawing visitors to you, and establishing a network of people with common interests, and who’ll likely prove to be a valuable well of resources that you wouldn’t have been able to find any other way. As much as I’d like to see traffic explode on my site, I’m looking for a particular audience of people to attract to my blog, people who would probably share similar goals, personalities and interests. Eventually, the experience of having a small but established readership may prove to be more of a valuable source of information than even 5000 feeds could provide. :-)