Whipping My Google Reader Into Shape In The New Year

My goal today is to clean out my Google Reader.

Google Reader is the RSS feed aggregator I use to follow all of my favourite weblogs ranging in topic from personal life stories to website design to the latest in keen salt and pepper shakers. At least, it used to be.

When I attempted to wade through my reader this morning, I realized that I had not checked out my favourite weblogs in quite some time. It has become too overwhelming. Over seven-and-a-half years of blogging, I have accrued hundreds of favourites when it comes to weblogs, and all of them have been dutifully added to my reader and ignored, because my reader is just too full to know where to begin.

I can delete everything that is over a week old, I can bypass certain weblogs that seem to be going through a broken record phase, and I can even decide to skip my entire folder named People I Know In The Physical World, because, being my friends, they will understand, but even after deleting all of that, my Google Reader tells me that I have 1000+ weblog entries left untouched. Defeated, I close it down and don't read anything.



If I've learned anything as a content creator, it is the importance of remaining engaged with your peers, and the ongoing avalanche that is my Google Reader is not getting me there. If I want to remain engaged and inspired, it is time for my Google Reader to go on a drastic diet.

As I weed through my reader's collection, I will ask myself the following questions. Each time the answer is no to any of them, I will be freed of at least one drop in the tidal wave of weblogs I attempt to follow and will be one step closer to finding the inspiration and connectedness I intend:

1. Have I visited the weblog in question in the last three months?
2. Did I decide to follow the weblog in question after reading only one interesting entry but have not found the same spark a second time?
3. Do I continue to follow the weblog in question only out of a sense of social obligation?
4. Does the weblog in question regularly make me feel positively or negatively about myself and/or my creative pursuits?
5. Do I most often bypass the weblog in question in favour of reading other weblogs?

As much as it is difficult to winnow my Google Reader's stash of weblogs down to a manageable and readable number, it is an important step to finding my social and creative internet mojo again.

Have you lost your social and creative internet mojo? What will you/have you done to get it back?