Feed Overload

I think I'm suffering from feed overload!

I migrated my 97 RSS feeds to Google Reader exactly 40 days ago, and since then I've managed to rack up an additional 62 feeds. A lot of these new subscriptions are people I had found through the tidal wave of Twitter traffic generated by the SXSW Interactive Festival.

One of the things that repeatedly struck me as I surfed through all these new sites is how noticeably different the "blogging voice" is from the more conversational "tone" that people tend to use on Twitter. It's eye-opening because you see snippets of people's lives as they move back and forth between work and play.

The downside: I can get totally lost reading all these feeds. There have been several occasions in the past two weeks where I'd be reading one site after another, only to be shocked when I finally look at the time and realize it's already 2am (or in one case 4am!).

The upside: there's so much instant gratification in the feed reading experience. I learn something new with almost every new blogpost or article that I read, since there are so many things that I know so little about! haha! I always get a little buzz when I learn something new, even if it's of little practical or immediate value. I guess that's why it's so hard to resist the temptation to make 'just one more click...'

I don't quite know how yet, but one way or another I'm going to have to get this habit under control. There really is such a thing as information overload.