Too Many Weblogs

I posted yesterday that I’m reading over 200 blogs these days. Those aren’t Scoble numbers (is he over 700 yet?) but there sure is a lot of noise. It reminds me of when I first joined Microsoft – there was so much information available and I wanted to read it all. So I went through several cycles of signing up for a bunch of distribution lists, getting to the point where I wasn’t really reading them, then removing myself. I think I’m at that point for reading blogs.

I’ve cut my list of feeds down to just 20 technical bloggers, though 6 of them are .NEAT teammates or architect evangelists in the field. I’ve also subscribed to a bunch of community feeds, the main MSDN feed and the MSFT Download Center feed.

I don’t plan on keeping my list of bloggers this low. 20 just seemed like a nice round number to start. There is so much interlinking that with the 20 I picked, I feel that I’ll still find out about the important posts without having to read so many entries. I do know that I’ll subscribe to any teammate or field AE who starts blogging, because I like to keep up on what they’re blogging about. I think that for other new blogs, I’m going to create a “tentative” category. Then I can get a feel for the blog before deciding to keep them. Of course, I can delete feeds anytime, but having a tentative category helps remind me of my level of commitment to reading the blog.

Comments:

Hi Harry, I have reached the same point as you. Just checking all the blogs on weblogs.asp.net is difficult enough. Especially with all the ex gotdotnet bloggers also being hosted there. In fact I am trying to write an application where it "pre reads" the set of blogs I have defined in an OMPL file and if any of my predefined keywords are found it is highlighted. The greater the number of the keywords found the higher the ranking. The sheer volume of information is incredible but a great step forward but it is difficult to follow.
Sounds cool!