As if to show how connected blogs are, a few bloggers I know are feeling an almost collective syndrome which I can only call Blog and Feed Fatigue. Being a Singaporean, I will abbreviate this and call it BFF. Admittedly, I’ve heard of a similar term previously, along with the murmurs that blogging has peaked.

(That was all that I managed to salvage from yesterday morning’s lost post.)

Ben and Van both write that they are inundated with feeds. Benjamin has 104 feeds; Van has over 650 feeds! Another fellow-blogger has even stopped reading his feeds entirely. As Van reflects:

I can’t remember much of what I read, and I can’t piece things together. I can spend the whole day attending meetings and replying to emails without doing work that would really make an impact. It is so easy to fall into this trap. Likewise with feeds.

We’ve all been too greedy. Feeding, feeding, feeding… it’s time we go on a diet.

When I first moved from Bloglines to Google Reader, I reduced my feeds from over 300 to around 200. On Monday night, I engaged in a feed reduction exercise which followed the procedure of that first purge, just that I was more stringent. Now, I have about 150 feeds. Here’s what I did:

1. Get rid of feeds that haven’t been updated in a long while. (using Google Reader’s Trends feature) This is just housekeeping. It reduced the number of feeds to which I’m subscribed but didn’t really give me any productivity gain. Still, it’s nice to see numbers go down.
2. Get rid of feeds which are updated very often. Some blogs and news sites come up with content faster than I can even skim through them. I got rid of most of them because I’m subscribed to other like-minded souls who will highlight them. I was sorely tempted to get rid of my Flickr contacts feed, my most active subscription. I relented, culling my Flickr contacts instead. =P
3. Get rid of feeds which leave no impression. If I couldn’t recall the title, had no idea who’s the author (I was slightly flexible on this) or remember what the feed is about, then it’s pretty much safe to delete the feed.
4. Get rid of acquaintances’ feeds. Met them, added their feed, didn’t really read them. Out went the feeds.

If you’re an uber-geek like Kevin, then you just filter your feeds for the content you really want. Still, unless it’s a niche term, the filter has to be very well-defined to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I still have to get rid of the bad habit of saving posts for future reading. All that does is leave a growing number of unread posts. While I have plenty of those, I don’t seem to be adding to others’ unread posts.

Blogging fatigue is the flip side of the coin. Here, the content provider is just tired of producing content. Maybe it stems from the information overload. Garbage in, garbage out. Or more accurately: nothing in, nothing out. After all, the information overload makes us skim/skip through posts, so we don’t have anything to digest in the first place.

Perhaps that is part the reason I’ve not been blogging as much. Perhaps it is plain inertia. Blogging involves discipline. Just like I haven’t been able to drag myself to the gym as often as I was able prior to my two weeks away, I haven’t been able to bring myself to blog either.

So, I guess the solution for all these are diet and exercise!

Back to the gym. Back to blogging. :)

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