Since I got a ton (15k+ ) hits from when #lifehacker, linked here, I thought I’d go through the process that I’ve been using.
Remember:
A-list: read every word, mostly actionable. Lifehacker, Cicerone, Lenderama, Bloodhoundblog, Blown Mortgage, Weblog Tools, Personal Brainding are some examples, there are 40 in this list…starting today, I will probably get it to 35 weblogs.
B-list: High quality, I want every word, not necessarily today. Lifehack (dustin wax), Awake at the Wheel are two good examples of that. Comics go here, so does the Dilbert Blog.
C-List: Optional reading, nothing new or novel or necessary, and the stuff that I’ll get elsewhere. Think Seth Godin, Personal Finance Blog, Music Blogs, most friends blogs. This is getting to be the biggest list, and I’m getting to where I don’t read it all anymore.
D- List: Deliberately Avoid. Not necessarily because of quality, but because the information will show up elsewhere. The best stuff about Google or Apple appears so many places so quickly after Google or Apple says it, why bother? Productivity hacks show up in #lifehacker. Anything political winds up here because life is too short. When I open reader, I ‘mark all as read.’ This keeps me from having duplicate subscriptions, I can subscribe, and sometimes stuff will fall out of….
Newly Added: Newly added where everything I subscribe to goes. With this system, I can subscribe to dozens of feeds, and not worry if i’ve subscribed before. If they get marked as read by d-list, that’s what happens.
What you see here is the ‘newly added,’ section of Greader. It’s the stuff that I’ve found in the next month or so. Every day on the 18th, I make a decision on that stuff…does it go into my A list for useful stuff, my B list for interesting stuff…my C list for stuff that’s purely optional, or my D list, for stuff that gets ‘marked as read,’ and that I’m deliberately avoiding.
Freelance Switch- Total A list. The content is uneven, and I intend to guest post there soon, but when it’s good, it’s a worldbeater. Has the highest high notes of any blog I’ve found this year, and is the most frequently enriching. YOU MUST SUBSRCIBE. THAT MEANS YOU, TERI. I always demote for every ad, so Athol, you lasted a long time. You’re friggin entertaining, and you were the last non-actionable blog in the “A” list.
Ink an Vellum is good writing to be sure, but I don’t see it as an every day need to read. It get’s C-listed.
Men With Pens: Tough Call. I’m going to put them in the “B” list, and also leave ‘em in newly added so I keep my eye on them. They would benefit from shorter, more infrequent posts because there’s repetition involved, and I’m repetition tolerant. I didn’t make a decision last month on them. From the b-list exits Indexed. Highly entertaining, but never necessary.
Problogger moves to the “C” list because Darren is on content repetition mode. Not that I don’t admire or can’t benefit, I want to have FEWER feeds to reed each month.
I can’t Believe I’m Still Single: makes the D list. Nothing against it, but the content is not novel, and not enriching enough to read on an iterated basis. I’m not the audience, I don’t think.
Ikeif – B list. Mostly because Keith is a good guy and a friend, and a kickass programmer. He has links, and if you’re a #programmer, you’ll want to include his links as he has some big damn ambitions for building code repositories/best practices.
Official Gmail Blog: That goes Dlist. Why? Because the content is are rebroadcast on lifehacker, so it’s in the mark as read pile
…OK, you get the gist.
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[...] I was – and still struggle with – this idea in my RSS feeds. I need to adopt GenuineChris’s method, but I’m too busy reading my feeds to do it. [...]