Keep your RSS feeds under control with Google Reader

With all the dif­fer­ent types of media com­ing at me elec­tron­ic­ally these days, I’m always look­ing for ways to bet­ter man­age the flow through the firehose.

One fea­ture that I’ve just dis­covered, though it’s been in the applic­a­tion for a while, is the Trends view of your Google Read­er habits. Yes, we all know that Google is col­lect­ing data on you and your activ­ity through the tools, but here’s one way to use that data to your benefit.

In my case, Google Read­er Trends view allows me to review inact­ive or aban­doned blogs, and purge them from my read­ing list. Simply select the Inact­ive tab from the Trends view and you’ll see the last date Google Read­er was able to grab the RSS feed from that site.

Note: This does­n’t neces­sar­ily mean that the site is down or the blog has been aban­doned. The site own­er may have just changed the URL of the RSS feed…in that case, you’ll have to search for the web­site and resubscribe.

But in my case, I have about 40 blogs that were no longer pub­lished, or the last post was over a month ago. For the most part, that’s too long without a post , so they’ve been removed, but some I’ll keep as I know the author posts infre­quently, but I always enjoy it when they do.

But that begs the ques­tion: How often is ‘often enough’ for the feeds you read? Do you want daily posts or is weekly enough? Or just post when you’ve got some­thing good to say? Hmmm, food for anoth­er post, methinks 🙂

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Google Read­er, RSS, RSS Feed, Feed read­er, News, art­icle, Trends, Google Read­er Trends, Google Trends, Blog, Blog Post, Blog Post­ing Frequency