At the BloggerCon III Overload session, I mainly wanted to listen. In a former life (pre-baby!), I subscribed to 1000 feeds and actually read them like Scoble. But as I suspected, not everybody is like Robert and myself. Most people are sane :-) when it comes to subscriptions. And thus ideas that work for me may not be applicable to the general population! For work, we are definitely aiming any improvements we make to the Drupal aggregator at humans who use RSS rather than people like me, so I was content to hear how normal people use RSS. And after a week, I have had time for my ideas on how to handle my personal information crystallize.

For what it's worth, here's how I plan on eliminating my RSS information overload:

  1. Subscribe only to 150 blogs at the most. These 150 will be people not search feeds from PubSub, Feedster, etc. and I will read them every day or at least try to. And I will update this list and add and remove people at least once a month. This group I will call MUSTS.
  2. For the companies and blogs that I write, I will create PubSub and Feedster feeds for these companies' and blogs' keywords as well as RSS feeds for links to their URLs. This will be called WORK. I intend to keep this list to 100 feeds or less.
  3. The rest (over 500!) will go into NICE TO READ and I will set them to the items to auto-expire so that if I don't read them for 24 hours, they are deleted. And if I find something in a NICE TO READ consistently, then I will promote it to MUSTS.

That's it that's all. There's no need to read everything. If you miss something, it's still out there on the web so you can find it via search (unlike in emails) and as well your MUSTS and WORK will find it as Dave Winer and others have pointed out.

Finally, although I love Bloglines and recommend it to RSS Newbies, I don't use it. Why? No auto-expiry of items AFAIK. If that was added, I would probably move my MUSTS list to Bloglines. The WORK, I would still keep in NetNewsWire because I don't want people to know what keywords and which sites I am tracking links to :-) !

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