Adrian just cut down the list of RSS feeds he reads by about 5%. Of course, he was starting at a crazy high total of 950 feeds. Yow!
Anyway, his example inspired me to cut down my puny list of 225 feeds by a similar amount. In this case that means 10 feeds to unsubscribe from. It turned out to be pretty easy, actually. The first ones I dropped include a bunch that just crank out too many posts, and not enough catch my eye to make it worth sifting through all those posts. Too much noise, not enough signal.
The good news is that each of those sites was cranking out an average of 20 or more posts per day. In at least half of the feeds I deleted, the folder in FeedDemon was filled to capacity, with 200 unread posts.
Now, if I wanted to cut my list from 225 down to 10, I might have kept some of those sites. But my personal preference is to read only places where the quality level is very high. If there’s something on one of those bigger sites that’s relevant to me, I’m confident that a John Walkenbach or a Dwight Silverman or a Scott Hanselman or Raymond Chen or Dori Smith will comment on it. The people on that list are amazingly good at finding stuff I’m interested in, and I’m happy they’re around as filters.
Meanwhile, I feel liberated, having just deleted more than 2000 posts I was never going to read.
One of these days I’ll publish my feed list if anyone’s interested.
… I just noticed that the J-Walk Blog is still in beta:
So visit at your own risk.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
Have you seen Share Your OPML? Your post reminded me that I hadn’t updated my listing over there for quite awhile. Unfortunately Google Reader still doesn’t allow you to make your OPML easily public automatically so I still have to update my listing manually occasionally. I think I remember NewsGator Online having that feature (though it’s been awhile) so it might be easy if you are interested in going that route.
I’d be interested.
I would be interested as well.
I’d like to see your feeds too, your opinions on feeds with too many entries is spot on. P.S. how come J-Walk doesn’t get a hyperlink?
Oops. Should be fixed now.
In all honesty most blogs suck and have nothing of value. Even with news sites most are redundant. A good blog in my opinion fully covers one topic well so you don’t have to. If the RSS feed is not making your life easier to stay informed on a subject then I say drop it.
Hear, hear. I just cut mine down by quite a bit the other day. Too many of the blog entries were just repeats of each other. And I’m using FeedDemon too.