"Feed organization and entropy"

I use Google Reader to read feeds. I have a "daily" folder for feeds that I really need to keep up on, and everything else is filed away into about 20 other content-specific folders.

However, I realized that I only read the "daily" folder, and never look in any of the other folders. Ever. And I'm continually paring down the contents of the "daily" folder, as I don't have time to keep up with those either.

In fact, I'd stopped reading about music, food, art, design, inventions, gadgets, free mobile games, travel.

In the end, I was basically reading Planet Mozilla and the Mozilla wiki's "recent changes". And while I love Moz, that's a far too singular lens through which to vicariously experience life.

So, I'm going for the "river of news" strategy: I've moved all feeds into the root folder, and will prune from there. I've hidden the folder tree (which I wasn't using anyway), which leaves more real estate for content. I've interspersed my work with my play feeds, which will hopefully bring some variety into my digital walkabouts.

I have a followup task: to step away from the computer altogether at some point.

Ack, almost forgot about the "entropy" part of this post! While pruning feeds, I noticed that a bunch hadn't had any posts in a while. I checked out a few, and found that the feed URL had changed, but the author hadn't set up redirects, or published any notice at all on the feed. Lame.