I’ve now had a look at each one of those sites to see if I like them, and have subscribed to a fair few. Guess what

Nooo! Its happening again! I know what you’re thinking -what’s Matt going to do? How does he know which ones to read? Surely he can’t read through all of them? Oh the humanity!

I know. Tense, isn’t it.

Don’t worry (as if), I have a plan! It’s something I heard on the Boagworld podcast and seems guaranteed to boost my blog subscription reading productivity (and other mouth-watering keywords)! In fact, my boss is using it to organise his subscriptions to business and marketing blogs (I’m currently subscribing to business, marketing, writing, science and videogame blogs, just so you know).

The trick is folders

A revelation, huh. Okay, not really. I had folders before of course, but I used to organise by subject. Now though, I organise in such a way that the ones I am most interested in get read first. This is lifted pretty much wholesale from the Paul Boag method, but here are the folders I’m trying:

Must read. My absolute favourites, that I just can’t miss out on, and where I will always go first.

Frequent posters. I like these posts too, but there are just too many of them! Still, once the count for Must Read hits 0, I can sift through these to find interesting entries. By the way, as I was adding to Google Reader, I saw that some bloggers post as frequently as 9 times a week! I mean, it’s just not happening, is it? What’re they trying to do to me?

Not too bothered. Let’s be honest, I am probably never going to read these, but they may very well be good if I am researching a particular topic and want some reliable sources to search through. Other than that, they’re not really on my radar.

Finishing touches

Now here’s the bit that makes it all work – my trusty iPod! The regular reader’s wifi enabled dream device (or at least, until the iPad takes off)! Want to read what you’ve subscribed to on the train; while you’re walking (watch out for that curb); while your other half has some godawful trash *cough*dancingonice*cough* on telly? There’s an app for that.

In fact, there are probably around fifty, but the one I use is MobileRSS, because it’s free, and I can save the money to buy games *cough*timewastersthatdistractmefrommywriting*cough*.

And what about ones I want to keep? Well, I also have an account with a handy dandy thing called Instapaper, which will strip my favourite articles of clutter, and allows me to store them in topic-based folders (because I’ve already read them, you see).

In addition, I can also save any individual article I happen to come across when browsing the web. And guess what, there’s an app for Instapaper too. And you can save to Instapaper directly from MobileRSS. Brilliant!

As I said, Paul Boag goes into great detail about these methods, to so you may want to check out the full article.

But there’s still the sticky problem of reading through 100+ blogs and deciding which folder they go in, so that’s enough rambling from me. I’ve got reading to do.