The Case for RSS

David Sparks:

If you are thinking about using RSS, I have a little advice. Be wary feed inflation. RSS is so easy to implement that it’s a slippery slope between having RSS feeds for just a few websites and instead of having RSS feeds for hundreds of websites. If you’re not careful, every time you open your RSS reader, there will be 1,000 unread articles waiting for you, which completely defeats the purpose of using RSS. The trick to using RSS is to be brutal with your subscriptions. I think the key is looking for websites with high signal and low noise. Sites that publish one or two articles a day (or even one to two articles a week) but make them good articles are much more valuable and RSS feed than sites that published 30 articles a day.

This is precisely why I have three categories of RSS feeds in Feedly: Must Read, Important, and Casual. Your mileage may vary, but this system works for me — I always have just the right amount of reading to catch up on and more available, should I need it and have the time to go through it.