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.

So David Chappel is blogging. No, not that David Chappel.

I’ve seen David speak at several MSFT events – both internal and external. He’s great. Only downer is that he’s using Blogger which doesn’t support RSS. But Web2RSS has created a feed for him.

I downloaded and installed the new NewsGator trial in a VPC to see how it looks. Maybe I’m still getting used to this whole Outlook news reader thing, but I don’t understand why NewsGator continues to flatten my OPML hierarchy. RSS Bandit, SharpReader and intraVnews all respect my hierarchy. I may not read as much as Scoble, but I am reading over 200 blogs these days and I like to categorize them. Favorites, GDN Workspaces, .NET bloggers, MSFT bloggers, Blogs I only scan the headlines of before I delete them, etc. But when I import that same OPML into NewsGator, it gets flattened into one big list of feeds. Apparently, you can manually move the folders around once they are created, but I’m not interested in doing that 200+ times.

Too bad, because the online services looked cool.

I see from Jim, Rory and Scoble that there’s a “Weblog Meetup” on Wed. evening. It’s at a bowling alley. I hate bowling. I mean, I really hate it. As in I’d consider lighting myself on fire to get out of bowling. But this bowling alley has good beer and Wed is not karoke night. So I think I can make it.

My old teammate Rick Culpepper quit working for Microsoft several months ago because he couldn’t hack the travel. Of course, neither could I - but there are alot more non-travel positions in Redmond, WA than Nashville, TN. Good news for Microsoft, Rick’s back as a TAM for the healthcare vertical.

Welcome back, Rick!

Update: Apparently, I can’t spell “Culpepper” or “months”. Corrected.