A day ago, my RSS grazing list was running around 320+ feeds, and well over 9900 items - simply because a few feeds were sort of duplicates, as well as because some feeds are configured to hold the 200 latest items. A little excessive, but nothing I can do about it. You, on the other hand, can.

When you configure your feed, try not to go past 50 items, unless you have the kind of site where that might be the number of items posted in a single day. Nevertheless, having an alternate compact feed might be worthwhile.

The net result of having these monster feeds that I really wanted to subscribe to was that I left many of them alone for over a week after subscribing. My list of feed items just kept growing and growing, and I just kept getting more intimidated.

Finally, I'd had enough and decided to acid-test some of Bloglines' features. (Bloglines, as you might know from this post, is my current feed reader/ aggregator of choice, but it hasn't always been.)

I removed several feeds that don't appear to have been updated in over 2 weeks, as they tend to be a visual distraction. I also removed semi-duplicate feeds and anything I wasn't actually reading from Bloglines default list (when you create an account).

Then came the hard part. I had to trim my huge unread-items list. So I browsed as many feeds as I could in a half-day, regardless of the number of items. I only browsed the first paragraph or two (depending on whether it was a full- or partial-text feed) of every item. If an item caught my eye, and if I thought I needed to know about it or could otherwise write about it myself, I clicked on Bloglines "Keep New" checkbox. It's the bottom right of every item, and the count of such items is kept separate in each feed from the count of new items.

The net result? I culled out maybe 3,000 items in about 8 hours. (It would have gone faster had I not been watching TV simultaneously.) I'm still not one of those mega-grazers like Robert Scoble or Nick Wilson (Performancing.com) who subscribes to and reads 600-700 feeds daily. But because of my writing, the 300 or so that I am subscribed to are a necessity. And my list will probably fluctuate and grow as I write more weblogs for other people.

One tip I can suggest to anyone new to this style of researching. I've learned it the hard way. If you are grazing feeds with the intent of finding material to write about, like I do daily, don't take notes as you go. It'll seriously drive you insane. I felt like I couldn't keep up. Trust your memory to remember the salient points, and use the Keep New feature regularly. Return to saved items when necessary.

If you browse multiple feeds, you'll quite likely find that new, unique articles brew in your mind. This will not happen as often if you stop to take notes on every single item you read. Eventually, you'll develop your own "must-read-daily" type of folder, similar to the one Darren Rowse calls his A-list. So finding an item again later, for further details, will not be as difficult. Even better, you can "clip and save" an interesting item to the built-in "Clippings" folder, which will make it easier to find later. Once you're done with a clipped item, you can delete it.

I'm really starting to see why Bloglines is so popular. Bravo to whomever designed it. If I had tried to do the same kind of research with one of the other readers I have been using, I might grow to despise a large feed grazing list. As for RSS/ Atom/ web feeds in general, I certainly could not do the amount of research for my writing without them. And I haven't even started searching feeds yet.