Too much Google Readering? Or not enough?

Clicked on the Trends link in Google Reader tonight and saw some of my stats. I’ve been in there before but hadn’t realized they’ve been counting my reads for a while.
155,216 items read? That seems like a lot. In almost 5 years, maybe not so crazy. 30k/year. Over 80/day. Yikes. Maybe that is high.

I saw this article on Ars about how RSS is just a waste of time, or worse. (Which is nice since most blogs claim RSS is dead, I read Ars cause they are smarter than everyone else.) A lot of the points they made seemed to me like they just weren’t using it right. I don’t have sites I visit everyday in my reader. I have sites that don’t update all the time, or that publish a lot but I like to read a large percentage of them and I’d rather filter out stuff than visit the site and throw a bunch in my reader. (Ars falls under tech blogs, so I don’t subscribe to their RSS, but I have more stuff from them in my Read It Later than any other site.)

Seeing that crazy number makes me think I might not be doing it right either. If you just look at my last 30 days, I’m reading over 200 per day. I’m not sure that’s even possible. I think part of it is that when using Reeder on my Mac I click quickly to mark things as read, not actually reading them.

It’s about time for a reader fall cleaning. I have my eye on the main culprit. A music blog I follow to help me find new bands. The hit rate is so low that it’s not really worth it. I haven’t found another way I like as much (don’t really like Pandora or last.fm). If Spotify made a little bit of effort, they could do it. Too bad.иконопис