Last week I made the resolution to bring down the number of RSS subscriptions from 182 to a more manageable, lower figure. But after one week of unsubscriptions, I see no sensible improvement. It looks like my personal struggle with information overload is lost in principle: as soon as I get hold of a tool to enable easier and faster access to information, I immediately scale up the quantity of information I want to access.

The initial hierarchical organization by categories did not help me at all: when 20 or more unread posts are teeming in the same folder, it gets difficult to catch up and different kinds of blogs get mixed. I briefly considered trying to bring about a better organization, by using Google Reader and its tags feature but I soon realized that it wouldn’t help reading them in a more efficient way, nor it could make me decide which feeds were the right ones to unsubscribe to: tags, reflecting complexity, could provide a good overall picture and are a good way to map single posts and give a place in my mental geography to static pieces of content. But they cannot help me prioritize my reading list. Blogs, like everything else, may be miscellaneous… but in an everchanging way: each one in its special, unique, continuosly developing and sometimes self-contradicting fashion.

I concluded that this is one of the cases where I simply have to know what I’m reading by name, nothing more and nothing less. Therefore, I maintained my old thematic categories for feeds coming from newspapers, reviews and brilliant specialized bloggers. I will let unread posts accumulate there, till I feel in the mood for reading something on the subject and find myself in the position to appreciate the remarkable load of high quality content.

And, in a single miscellaneous folder, I’m putting all the blogs that I read because they resonate with me,
because of proximity in subject or location, or simply because I care about the person who
writes –
with no regard to the subject at all. That’s where it is easy to keep the unread posts count at zero and remember why feed readers are such a great tool.