That's right—I have 11,072 unread items on my feed reader. All of it pretty much equates to me being way behind on my subscriptions. I am either subscribed to too many feeds, engaged in too many other things to bother, uninterested in the feeds which I am subscribed to, or a combination of all three. It would appear that it is time to fix this problem right now.

Obviously, I am subscribed to way too many feeds, but I have to be keep on top of things. How can we solve this problem? First, I could use a feed filtering service like AideRSS, illumio, or FilterMyRSS. Next, I could use the abilities within many feed reading applications to discover content that has only the content I want within the feed (alternatively, I could exclude this content as well)—NetNewsWire and FeedDemon offers functionality like this. Finally, I use services like TechMeMe, Reddit, and Digg to get only the best news out there.

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Use mini blogs to enhance your blog and your single articles!

The idea of using asides is not new but still something most bloggers don't think about. Why? Simply because most bloggers are article oriented. Beside publishing the 'big' content you should always have an eye on enhancing your content.

One of the easiest ways to cover small aside content on your blog is to find a way to publish the small snippets in your template automatically at an appropriate place. If you use the grid concept or simply little divs floating at the right place doesn't matter.

How to create a mini blog for your site

How to get those snippets? I find it very easy and useful to write mini blogs by using good and short notes for my del.icio.us bookmarks and/or good descriptions on Flickr.

If you use the (tag) feed output of those sites you can have a nice publishing form on your blog. If the produced content is directly in your code and not generated by some JavaScript widget you will gain additional search engine love too!

My workflow for a mini blog

Very often I do a research on a certain subject and during that research publish a lot of useful mini-blog content by bookmarking found pages on del.icio.us. Tag those bookmarks appropriately and you have a great enhancement for your blog.

On my local news site in Hamburg Sankt-Georg.Info you will find the latest ten of my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged 'Hamburg' in the sidebar (which is only on that homepage not in the single article template).

The same technique is reproducable for every single article. You just have to tag your mini blog content right.

I am using the SimplePie plugin for Textpattern to fetch the RSS feeds and publish them directly in my code (Links to d.i.u. feed outputs).

It is up to your imagination what you can do with those mini blogs...

Most of you know that I'm lazy and that I don't adopt new web apps and technology unless I'm convinced that it will be around 12 months from now. I usually just go with a minimalist approach to everything and it seems to work well (otherwise I'd be bogged down trying every new thing under the sun and wouldn't accomplish any real work).

I figure that there are lots out there like me. You take your time before adopting new methods and new technologies. That's why I created the weekly "Four Questions for the Performancing Community" series of posts. I figure that together we can probably come to a consensus about important issues more easily than on our own.

This week's 4 questions surround reader subscription models.

1. What forms of subscription do you offer on your blog (RSS, Email Digest, Newsletter, etc) and how do you encourage subscription signups?

2. Do you, or do you plan, to monetize your subscription base?

3. If you offer multiple forms of subscription (RSS, Email Digest, Newsletter, etc.) do you worry about spreading your subscription base too thin for monetization?

4. Do you worry that RSS subscribers avoid your website and are thus less monetizable? How do you plan to rectify the situation?

Those of us who are primarily political bloggers tend to find that we get buried in blog feeds from time to time. We try to keep up on the latest topics, find blogs that are watching those topics, add their feeds to our readers and promptly forget why they're there. In fact, before long our feed readers become a prison rather than the tools they're supposed to be.

But if you want to keep up with things, you're going to need to use feeds to do it. Does this necessarily mean getting crushed with too much information? No, it doesn't, and I'd like to use this post to suggest some time-saving ways of getting your information.

Those of you who use Bloglines may have encountered their new "Playlists" feature. This is hugely beneficial for quick sweeps of information. By creating new playlists, you can see all the most recent headlines for all the feeds in that list at a glance, thereby eliminating the need to click through every single feed looking for what you need.

But of course, relying on other people's blogs to be informed isn't always a good option. After all, even if they're informed on your topic, they may not always talk about things you need to know. No sense wading through someone's reality when you don't have to. As a solution to this, there is the little-discussed set of tools from Google, their news and blog search feeds. If you search for a topic on either of these two sections of Google and look to the left, you will see links to get the RSS or Atom feed. That's not just any old feed, that's basically a custom feed of your search terms! Any new blog posts or news items (respectively) that fit the criteria of your search will immediately become available to your new feed. Of course, you may need to fiddle with your search terms to get what you want, but with patience you can get a laser-sharp search going and be straight on top of the whole issue!

How about Yahoo!Pipes? Ever heard of them? Well, here's a great way to mash up a bunch of individual feeds into one, thereby eliminating the need for feed after feed of information. With a bit of practice and creativity, you could potentially search all the major news or blog search services at once and have all that information plugged into a new feed for your reader!

These are just a few creative suggestions to boost your productivity and hone your research to make you a more on-point blogger. What other ways have you found to make managing all that blogosphere more manageable?