How I Process Blogs and What I Do With All That Information

November 29, 2007

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A bit of a break this morning, from the usual blogging tips (although there will be another post this afternoon). I thought that I’d go over how I process all of the stuff that I read online. You, know, how your *readers* might do it.

First up, I use Google Reader religiously for my feed reading. I used to use RSS Bandit, but a situation with my web host made it impractical to do. Now I’ve got Google Reader skinned and configured the way I want it, so it’s just better to keep using it.

Once I get into Google Reader, I have just four different folders full of feeds:

Essential: these are the feeds that I’ll read before any others. If I have limited time, this might be the only folder I’ll read in its entirety.
News: feeds that can maybe wait a bit, but that still tend to be somewhat time-sensitive. Sites such as TechDirt, The Blog Herald, or Slashdot would fit in here.
Other: these are the feeds that I’ll get around to if I’ve got some spare time that I want to kill. These feeds are more for entertainment purposes, rather than news or information.
Skip: last ditch stuff that I try to keep up on, but if I don’t get around to checking it for a week or so, it’s not a big deal. This is the only folder that I’ll mark as read without reading it in its entirety.

Regardless of which folder I’m reading, I’ll only read the title and that will determine whether I read the rest of the post. Once I get through it, if I think it’s something that might beneficial to BloggingNotes readers, I’ll tag it ‘Blogging’ in my del.icio.us account, and it’ll appear in the sidebar.

If I come across something that would make a good post then I apply a star to it in Google Reader (’s’) and go on to the next post. Uninterrupted, I can get through my 80 feeds in probably 20 - 30 minutes depending on the amount of new content. From Reader’s ‘Trends’:

From your 81 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,932 items, starred 277 items, shared 8 items, and emailed 0 items.

Using this system allows me to keep up with as much information as I can as quickly as possible, and most importantly, on my terms. Everything is done in Google Reader, because I won’t subscribe to partial feeds. So if it can’t be done there, I won’t pay attention to it.

And those numbers above are down from they used to be. At my peak I was subscribed to about 260 blogs. That was too much, so I had to do a lot of trimming. I’ll still never understand how Robert Scoble followed 1200 blogs in his reader. Same way he follows 6000 people on Twitter, I guess.

How do you process all of the information coming in? Is overload an issue?

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