Firts I Have to make an excuse, it wasn’t personally. I was the one who took issue. I think I have to explain the original reason why I read this many feeds. I had to get some ammunition to fight against my former employer. I had to line up a couple of colleagues and get the hands together. This is the main reason I started blogging. Just a couple of weeks ago I decided to leave my employer for another. I had the feeling the “game” has ended. Nowadays I still read that many items, some stuff people find back on my blog, other stuff isn’t find on my blog because my former employer knows I have the knowledge and the vision and is watching my blog like an eagle. I agree with Robert that app. 1% is quality, the rest is crap. I think there’s another problem, the problem is the same as google has, what’s the quality on search results with google. Partly it depends on the search words, but it’s also depended on website strategies (Search engine Optimization). What Robert is doing is manual searching and filtering, simply because systems, applications and methods to do this automatically don’t exist nowadays. On the other hand, I’m happy, happy because in my opinion this is quite an interesting conversation. A couple of years we thouht RSS would solve our problems, our info-overload problems. I think with introduced a new problem, more information-overload. As Robert mentions, he acts like some kind of a human search engine, the difference is he’s done all the work already. I’m sucked into the rss addiction. Most of the times I love reading and screening news, some of the times I hate it. Maybe I’m an addict but it has helped me a lot!

Scoble’s point is that he is performing a service for other people. But you could directly subscribe to many of the interesting blog sites yourself and thus avoid duplication.

My feeling is that the service part is incidental – he subscribes to all the posts to ensure he doesn’t miss something even remotely important that is necessary in his work.

My point in that anything about 100 or 200 feeds succumbs to the law of diminishing returns so much so that it is no longer efficient to continue. I bet if you ranked your blogs by quality or consistency, we’d see a nice big long-tail graph. Which is awesome but we do not have infinite time or space like the internet. Which is why you ought to chop the tail off and throw most of it away.

What makes more sense sifting through 5,000 feeds a day for that one diamond in the rough, or putting a cap on there and letting it come to you? Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about effort–only results. If it was feasible and yielding to do all that, I’d burn my retinas out staring at the screen.

I read about 1,300 items every evening and put the best 80 out on my link blog. So, just read my link blog. It’s the best of tech blogs and journalism.

99% of everything is crap. It’s finding the 1% that’s hard.

Why am I the only one who’s found it? Simple: I have a better social network in the tech industry than almost anyone on the planet and I simply read more than they do.