Google Reader Organization

I love Google Reader, its my primary source of news these day, in fact I’ve all but given up on reading blogs or sites that don’t provide RSS feeds. Anyway, i digress. Over time my reader has grown to over 270 feeds and haphazardly organized into 75 folders. Well as you might expect that many folders became quite unmanageable.

I didn’t really know what to do until i came across this excellent post from Eric about organizing reader feeds. So i decided to give it a whirl. I spent a hour going through my feeds (cutting some out) and organizing them into 6 folders based on when i should read them or their type.

Tier 1 – those that i read throughout the day. Feeds like breaking news, friends blogs, time sensitive feeds (mostly financial related) and blogs that i consider to be thought leadership. This tier gets the most attention.

Tier 2 – feeds to read in the morning or throughout the day if time permits. This tier is mostly news feeds from the mainstream sources.

Tier 3 – feeds that i should read in the evening should time permit. Included in this tier are mostly blogs related to news and local happenings as well as blogs from more random sources but are current events driven.

Tier 4 – these are prolific technology related feeds (like engadget) that I try to get to once a day, but will get to at some point.

Tier 5 – these are feeds from news sources or blogs are often updated but i place less value on them. This tier i read if i have extra time. However, having them in their own folder makes it easy to hit mark all as read. This is the “nice to have” folder.

Tier 6 – these feeds related to hobbies and lower priority things, that i read on the weekends or when i have free time. They are not time sensitive, so it really doesn’t matter when i get to them. For example, recipes and photography related feeds.

I’ve been doing this for a few days and so far I am really happy so far with this layout. Its has really simplified things. The only feature that i would like Google Reader to add is the ability to nessle folders.Thanks Eric!

Posted in Technology on January 17th, 2009 Taged with Google Reader, RSS, Technology

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