In the past few weeks I have noticed something about myself, and I wanted to see if anyone else out there is experiencing the same thing:

I think I am being overfed by some of my RSS subscriptions.

Let me explain a little more. My internet surfing routine has been the same for a few years now- open Firefox (Bloglines is my homepage), click to pull in all of the latest items from all of my feeds at once, and slowly browse them throughout the day. When I hit the bottom, I refresh and slowly browse back down when I have a free minute or two. It has been an efficient and powerful way to browse for me.

Lately I have noticed that a few of my feeds are just too damn full to read every day. Digg, Engadget, now even Neatorama are trying to feed me 200 new items a day, or every other day. Instead of reading them, I find myself skipping them completely. 200 is just too daunting for most browsing sessions, and they just end up piling up more and more, like trash I am avoiding taking out. I also know that if I click on a feed with that many items, my browser is going to be locked up for a few minutes while they all load. Finally out of frustration I load them just to clear them out, barely reading anything contained therein.

I think that the mega blogs, the ones with multiple authors and editors, pumping out content at an insane daily rate, are guilty of not exercising editorial discretion. I used to find almost every entry on Engadget and Gizmodo fascinating, now I am lucky if I find two or three out of 200 that are worth any attention. I think that they are sacrificing quality for quantity, and I think they are publishing just to maintain a pace they themselves set. Don’t have much to say? Say it in 3 separate posts, then update them by changing a single word later in the day so they go back out on the feeds again! MAKE: is horrible at doing this- they republish a single day’s worth of content several times every single day; sometimes I think it is just to make themselves look more productive.

To me, blogs are like culture critics. They parse all the available information on a specific topic or range of topics, find the stuff that’s truly interesting to themselves, and post it for their like-minded readers to consume and enjoy. If a blog is just trying to churn out as many posts as possible simply to keep the perceived hunger of their fans satisfied, rather than only posting that which they find worthy… then the system, IMHO, collapses. Guys, you’re making life harder not easier on your fans and readers, please, cut it out.

Quantity ≠ Quality

[a quick note about the above image- the only manipulation done on it was to try and quickly group the overfeeders together, this was from a sceenshot in a single moment in time of my own Bloglines feeds, the numbers are not manipulated or sampled from multiple days. I really do have that many blogs overfeeding meon a daily basis]