Since my father introduced me to the internet sometime in 1993 I’ve been spending an accelerating proportion of my time on this earth chasing hyperlinks. Its the most wonderful crazy pastime and I’m so glad I’m alive to experience this staggering outpouring and accretion of thought, creativity & documentation from all of networked humanity.

For the first 10 years or so it was a fairly manageable habit, I’d visit a few favourite sites regularly and follow the links where they might wander and usually the trails would grow cold after a few hours or so. But with the advent of RSS things have changed, now the web pours in through my reader. and each day brings 100’s of new ‘items’ of human output in BOLD and i feel compelled to identify and offer some precious attention to those of interest, collecting and storing in Del.icio.us any of potential value.

Looking to reduce the time spent consuming and curating so I can instead add some of my own data to the flow I’ve tried various strategies. The latest realisation is that i must reduce my exposure to new items while at the same time trying to ensure that the items i receive to are of the highest quality. So today I’ve removed many feeds. leaving 334 subscriptions which I estimate will bring in around 300 items a day of which maybe a 100 or so will be worth investigating & perhaps the majority of those worth collecting & spending some time reading. I’m hoping this process can be reduced to less than 1 hour a day.

The feeds i removed had one or more of the following attributes:

• Too many new items per day with too many days where none/v.few are of interest
• Poorly formed feeds, cryptic/absent titles or excerpts rather than full text
• Too many promotional or opinion posts with less linking or original coverage/ideas
  Feeds with a consistent post format e.g. “Friday puzzle” that has become forced & patchy
• Too many “list of..” posts that take along time
  feeds that just collate links to stuff that is coming up in other feeds (no original contributions)
• Posts that are hard to read the contents of e.g. delicious’s daily automatic post to blog posts
• Photo blogs
• Group/Company blogs with many posts but no strong personal voice
• Own self monitoring feeds (my flickr updates/last.fm recently played) no longer fun to watch myself

The ones i kept have the following attributes:

• A few with very many items, but large percentage worth investigating (e.g. delicious popular) only handle 2 or three of these feeds though.
• Items added very occasionally (they go under the radar escaping deletion because a new item might appear only once every few weeks)
• Really well researched and written long form articles
• Anything covering design or user experience with original ideas and writing with 0-2 items per day,as these accumulate I will need to cull based on quality.
• Similar to UX but less important and more likely to be deleted feeds covering trends on the internet & in media
• A smattering of with 0 to 2 items per day covering other areas of interest: economics, psychiatry, game design, mobile, coding, art, SEO, marketing etc.

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