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Simon's recent tweet reminded me of a little feed reading efficiency trick I've wanted to post about for a while now.

Ever feel you're following too many RSS feeds? Ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of information waiting to be read in your favourite feed reader? I often hear people say that they're going to cut down on the number of feeds they're following. I've always found this a bit strange, since this number means nothing -- it's usually a few high-traffic blogs (I'm looking at you, TechCrunch) that eventually clutter your feed reader with hundreds, if not thousands, of unread items.

This problem is absurdly simple to solve, and the following solution isn't really very exciting at all, but to my own surprise, only very few people seem to be doing this. Sometimes the easiest solution is the hardest to spot, I guess.

What you'll need is a feed reader that lets you tag your feeds; the important bit is that you'll need to be able to assign multiple tags (or categories) to individual feeds. Google Reader will do this (it's the one I use), and I think Bloglines, too. There are probably others, but I've only used Google Reader for the last year or so, so I wouldn't know. I'm going to stick to Google Reader for the examples in this post.

You probably already have tags/categories set up for your different feed topics: web development, world news, gaming stuff, your friends' weblogs and so on.

Now, create a new tag called "_mustread". You can use any other name, of course, but the underscore is important, as it will move the tag up in the alphabetical list of tags in your reader's side bar.

Now think about which feeds are important to you; usually these will be feeds that you will want to know about as soon as possible when they've been updated. Tag these feeds with your new "_mustread" tag.

The trick is to focus on this "_mustread" tag during your daily RSS reading ritual. Google Reader is perfect for this, since it even lets you set a tag as the start tag that gets displayed when you load it up:

Even the iGoogle widget for Google Reader lets you default to a specific tag:

Now every time you load up Google Reader or iGoogle, you will be able to focus on just the important stuff, while ignoring the not-so-important feeds for the time being. If you end up having some extra time, you can go back to those and read them at your leisure.

In my setup, I have a tag called "_mustread" and one called "_friends", with all my friends' weblogs. Since these tags are at the top of the tags list, I see right away if something inside those tags has been updated:

There you go -- pure feed reading bliss. No need to let a big fat "Unread Items: 1000+" scare you.

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