Am I RSS bankrupt?

I've been pondering this week how I could rejuvinate my rammed-full folder of RSS feeds so that I can enjoy reading them a bit more, again. Make it more useful to track things I like and things I manage for my clients. But make it more fun too. Reading's fun, no?

Over the years I've used RSS socially, to begin with (like hooking up with PR people, journalists and media industry types who write about similar stuff to me) then in a PR context too as time has gone by. What started as a list of blogs, sites and social networks I was reading on a daily basis quickly became clusers upon clusters of key words and phrases that I had to monitor for breaking client PR issues. Training client press office operations on how to use RSS monitoring systems to increase press coverage has been something I tend to do quite a bit now too.

But now my own RSS system is busting at the seams, and although RSS readers are very good at cutting down on information overload, they can still get cluttered.

I am wondering about a few tricks I've seen people use to overcome this, and which would be best for me. Here are the three options for me as I see them.

1. Declare RSS bankruptcy. I could perhaps delete the whole lot (save them offline somewhere for future reference though) and start again. I read once that Steve Rubel does this.

2. Prune my RSS tree. I do this on Twitter, so why not RSS? Get rid of stuff I don't tend to bother checking any more and shape up the rest.

3. Fileage. I think I may just set up a new folder, put it at the top of all the others, and bung all the shiny new RSS feeds in there. Then everything will follow. I'm sure.

Come to think of it, content is king after all, so maybe I just need to find some new things to subscribe to. Does anyone have any recommendations on good feeds I should subscribe to that I might not be reading already?

Comments

[Kyle]

I went through this a while back and went with a nice mix of #2 and #3. Also at that time I made the switch from Bloglines to Google Reader in order to make it easier to control #3.

Now every few months, when I reach my threshold I do it all over again. Usually also corresponds to the same action on Twitter...speaking of which, I wish I could do some filing within Twitter as well!

/kff