Personally, I use RSS in Google Reader as a living bookmark system. I have about 500 subscriptions and don't pay any attention to the unread count. A couple times a week when I'm in the mood to check out stuff in a certain subject area, I'll go on google reader and click through things in that folder. For instance, if I'm looking for inspiration, I'll click through my "art and design" folder that has 50 to 100 feeds in it. Other times some business event will be in the news, and I'll go into my folder of business feeds.
Apparently using RSS in this way is somehow different than how most people use it. People complain about feeling guilty or somehow stressed out by unread counts. People complain about a psychological pressure to keep up with and read everything in a feed or collection of feeds.
However, I'm left wondering whether this is an issue with how the tools are designed, or perhaps with how RSS is framed. Perhaps we need to develop tools that deemphasize unread counts and instead further emphasize browsing or discontinuous digestion of the content streams.
For a time I thought topic based folders was the best approach, but over time I figured out that sorting folders in an 1 - 10 fashion, 1 being all the sites I really care about to 10 sites I would read if I have the time. By triaging my feeds like this I know then I can read the most important pieces in a very short amount of time. I don feel bad at all about emptying out the otter folders.
This seems like a great way to do things. Currently I have topical folders, and it isn't very optimized. I have things that I want to read (a few people's blogs, tech, security news, etc), and things that I might like to read (e.g. book reviews), and things that might be funny or a pleasant distraction (e.g. cat pictures) all mixed in together.
Moving to a priority model where folders are listed in order of general importance to me, sounds like a real improvement -- the ability to nuke lower priority folders without concern.
My browser pointed at Hacker News and sub-reddits is my "dip in to the info stream" tool. My RSS reader is for low-volume feeds where I'm fairly likely to care about each item.
Apparently using RSS in this way is somehow different than how most people use it. People complain about feeling guilty or somehow stressed out by unread counts. People complain about a psychological pressure to keep up with and read everything in a feed or collection of feeds.
However, I'm left wondering whether this is an issue with how the tools are designed, or perhaps with how RSS is framed. Perhaps we need to develop tools that deemphasize unread counts and instead further emphasize browsing or discontinuous digestion of the content streams.