Confessions of an info junkie
All right, I admit it. I am without a doubt an information junkie. I’ve come to terms with this fact after a couple recent revelations about my feed consumption.
I subscribe to nearly 300 feeds in Google Reader and this is after pruning quite a few from my list. I actually feel guilty when I click “Mark all as read” on a feed that I can’t keep up with. Last week was kind of crazy at my newspaper (and that’s a completely different story), but one result of all the chaos and deadlines was that I fell way behind on monitoring all of our RSS feeds. This is a non-critical task, but one that I usually stay on top of and that does uncover small areas for improvement from time to time. And going through all our stories on a daily basis helps me to feel more connected to our reporters and what they are writing about. Usually I take a few minutes between tasks several times a day to read a few stories. Last week got away from me, however, so by the time I got around to this I had more than 400 unread stories. With a twinge of guilt, I clicked the heretofore forbidden link: “Mark all as read”. I immediately starting wondering what I was missing out on by doing that. Sheesh.
Then tonight I noticed that Google Reader has released a small update that enables it to count all the way to 1000 instead of just 100 (among other things). Feeds with lots of unread items used to just be labeled as “100+”, but now more than likely (unless one is really far behind) the actual number of unread items will be shown. I long ago organized all my feeds into about 25 very specific folders one of which is “blogging”. I had deluded myself into thinking that I could catch up and at least skim all the unread items in this most neglected of folders. After all, it just said 100+. How bad could it be? Well now I know that there are exactly 524 unread items in that folder!
Plowing through all that information would be borderline quixotic, but I still feel an odd compulsion to try. I’m not sure if this is due to my competitive nature (me vs. Google Reader) or a desire not to miss out on any important stuff. I’m leaning toward the latter. I don’t have a definite plan for resolving this situation, but I’m going to start by going through all the feeds one-by-one and deciding which ones are really worthwhile. I’ll let you know how that goes.
In doing that, I can’t help but wonder if I would unsubscribe from this blog if I wasn’t me. In other words, is my own blog worthy of subscribers? At this point, I’m not sure but 27 people seem to think that it is worthy (according to FeedBurner). For their sake and mine, I am resolved to bring this ramshackle blog back up to snuff… just as soon as I finish reading these 524 posts…
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2 Responses to “Confessions of an info junkie”
I recommend Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week and his chapter on Low Information Diet. This will help take away that guilt of marking all unread posts as read.
It’s funny that you would mention Tim. His blog is one of my many subscriptions and 4HWW is on my list of books to read… but in true info junkie fashion there are about forty other books on that list.