As sloppy as my apartment can get (and believe me, it can get quite sloppy — though it’s usually just “extremely cluttered” as opposed to “disgustingly messy”, a small but important difference), I tend to be extremely organized in many other areas of my life. My occasional rants about metadata and .mp3 tags have probably clued a few people in to this aspect of my personality. I also tend to keep my movies, books, and music alphabetized, files on my computers all in their appropriate places, and so on. Heck, part of my drive to ensure that my web pages validate as clean, standards-compliant code stems from this innate desire for simple categorization and the ability to find things quickly.
To that end, since I started using NetNewsWire to keep up with the various weblogs and news sites that I like to read, I’ve used its grouping function to assign each RSS feed to a specific category — technology, macintosh, personal, and so on.
About a month ago, Rand was asking about RSS reading habits, and after a bit of thought prompted by his post, I’ve been wondering for a bit if this categorization is really the best approach for me to take. As my list of subscribed feeds grows (currently hovering right around 100 or so, give or take a few I’m reading on a trial basis — nowhere near Scoble’s 600+, but still fairly respectable), I’m finding it harder and harder to get through all my feeds on a regular basis. I’ve been doing very well at keeping up with sites that were in the groups at the top of the list (usually Personal and Macintosh), but not so well with groups towards the bottom (usually Links and Political). If I get bored, hungry, or distracted during my reading, the ones at the bottom get fairly regularly neglected.
So, starting tonight, I’m going to try to vary my reading habits a bit to see what that does. I’ve deleted all the groups I was using before, and instead have all the feeds listed in more-or-less alphabetical order, top to bottom in a single group, ordered by date posted. While the amount of information doesn’t really change, the presentation is different enough that it might make a difference in what I find on any given day. I know I’ve missed a few breaking stories over the past few weeks, especially in the political arena, simply because I wasn’t getting far enough through my reading to see them until they’d already been blogged to death by everyone else on the ‘net.
I’m hoping that this little adjustment will be enough to help me keep up with everything a little bit better. No way to know until I try, of course.
iTunes: “She Cries Your Name” by Orton, Beth from the album Who Will Be Big In ‘98? (1997, 4:47).
CJ
Brandon
Tim Who?
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I refuse to group mine for this very reason. I might miss something truly important. I’m hovering around the 100 level as well, and find that simply keeping an eye on updated posts for everything (ie: I’m able to view all new posts for all blogs at once using SharpReader, not sure about NNW) is easier, more productive and, in fact less intrusive.
Good times, eh?
I have mine grouped into “people I know” and “others”, and no other organization than that (though most of the reasoning behind this is laziness
I’m interested to see how your new reading method goes, and if it ends up the same with only the top few being kept up with. Personally I wish there was a way to categorize posts automatically into “interesting” and “uninteresting”, regardless of who they are coming from. IE: “my day sucked, here’s a picture of my big toe” posts go into uninteresting, and techie stuff go into interesting. Of course, this filtering method would vary by user, but would automatically adapt, perhaps through a neural interface 
I’ll try to remember to come back to this in a few days. So far it seems to be making a difference — as items are grouped simply by time, I get fewer instances of slogging through a long series of posts from a single source before switching over to a different topic. It’s not foolproof, of course, as some RSS feeds don’t have dates attached and still end up lumped together, but it’s a start.
Re: categories — while they were discussing weblog categorization rather than RSS readers, I loved this little idea from Grumpy:
i have my feeds in different folders, with those must read folders at the top and the rest in order of preference. this way, even if i’m out for the day and have hundreds of new posts, i can go check the top folders first and put the rest for later reading or might just trash the folders i don’t want to read that day.