Something I’ve been thinking about is the way I use my blog reader, and how it’s transformed the way I use the web.

In many ways it’s great to have information delivered to me on my terms. In a lot of the reading I do online, I don’t ever leave the RSS reader.

However there are problems with reading a lot of feeds, which makes me start to think maybe I need to rethink the classic model of RSS reading – create your blogroll and watch all the posts as they come in.

I’ve found myself often in a quandary about adding a feed to my blog reader. It’s already so choked with feeds that I constantly have to play gardener, pruning and trimming to make sure that I don’t get overloaded. (I almost always am anyways).

OK so a bunch of geniuses think they can solve my problem with blog overload by only finding me the ‘relevant’ posts.

Except that doesn’t work, that sucks. Taking management of my information consumption away from me is bad. Unless Google Reader is plugged into my subconscious, how will it really know what I want to read?

OK so here’s my solution for adding a zillion feeds. Add them to different blogrolls. I now maintain 5 blogrolls. I visit them in varying frequencies:

• Main Blogroll: anything that must be paid attention to. Bloglines nicely tracks for me what I’ve read. (Although I can’t keep it open anymore because their new JavaScript code breaks the entire page if I leave Bloglines open for too long, damn I hate Bloglines atm).
• FriendsRoll: Friends’, People I know or just think are cool lists of Bookmarks (del.icio.us feeds), Pictures (flickr feeds), and personal weblogs.
• Vanity Search: Who’s talking about me on the web. I like the idea of loosely coupled conversations over the web, posting comments and replies on personal blogs instead of in comments, but it’s still hard to keep track of who is talking about you. Also a single blog search rarely covers the entire blogosphere, so I use 4 engines: google blogsearch, feedster, icerocket, and blogpulse and subscribe to them all. (technorati obnoxiously doesn’t offer public RSS feeds)
• NewsRolls: I keep various news blogrolls, for entertainment. World News, Games News, Ajax News – all get their own blogrolls.

With many blogrolls, I don’t have to worry so much about overloading my queue of things to read every day. The question is: how do you keep a bunch of blogrolls? Well since there isn’t an easy way in Bloglines, Google Reader, or any other reader I could see, I rolled my own blogreader: BozPages.

It’s dead simple. Add a feed, make a blog roll, that’s it.

By the way, hearing about OPML at Seattle MindCamp really impressed on me of the usefulness of it. I have had generally a pretty negative opinion of OPML as people talking about it have made it seem too semantic-web-ey. Also it shoves data in xml attributes, and it’s of much less obvious use than RSS, but so far as having a standard format for blogrolls, it’s awesome.

I sometimes use BozPages as a kind of OPML viewer. I subscribe someone’s feeds to a BozPage, and then I can check out what the world looks like from their perspective. Unfortunately, OPML discovery is still in its infancy, people often don’t know and don’t publish their OPML feed urls. It’s too bad because there’s a lot of cool things that could be done if you could see who’s subscribing to you and who is subscribing to them and so on.