I agree with Rafi…. “just need to be more selective about what we do read.” I do two things in that regard… I try to weed through blogs and am constantly removing blogs that don’t post frequently or which I don’t find particularly useful. I’m keeping tabs on everything at a superficial level and am focusing my efforts on a more limited scope – there’s feeds I get to daily while there’s others I may only get to once every couple of weeks or so.

With the taggging feature of Google Reader, I use a limited set of topic tags for articles that I like, think others should read, or need to go back to at some point. Since each tag in Google Reader can be shared as its own RSS feed, I end up creating an RSS feed of those articles. Others can access that list, including me Links to my shared news feeds are in the sidebar of my blog.

-Chris

I definitely find myself in a similar situation to you (and, I imagine, many others!), and have recently been asking myself these same questions.

The answer I’m starting to formulate in my head (though I’m not sure it’s quite true yet) goes something like this. We can’t stay on top of it all. Nay, we shouldn’t. ‘It all’ has gotten to be so much that simply taking it in would result in cognitive overload, and ‘staying on top of it’ results in some wild relationships to our feed readers, where missing a day makes us anxious of all the posts we need to catch up on.

I don’t think that we should stop reading all this stuff, but maybe just need to be more selective about what we do read. Perhaps it’s more about paying attention to those key nodes, those figurative tipping points that will lead us to all the critical stuff not already in our readers, and about sticking with them and not adding new somethings to our aggregators every day without doing an internal reflection as to whether those somethings are really adding value or simply ‘feeding’ (no pun intended) what can sometimes be intellectual materialism.

These are important questions to ask, not only from the perspective of how to use this technology effectively, but also of how to maintain our sanity and intentionality while doing so. Keep on asking the tough questions Intellagirl!

PS – I totally added about twenty feeds from your .opml file when you posted it the other day, so I definitely can’t claim to be an expert on how to manage all this either! : )