About six and a half months ago, I recalibrated my feed reading. It worked out pretty well, but I was still winding up with piles of unread items on my iPhone. And I was getting overwhelmed on the desktop side.
So recently I bit the bullet and coalesced all my non-work feeds into one Google Reader account. I used NetNewsWire to merge my desktop feedroll into the Google Reader feeds. In addition, I did some gardening and weeding, eliminating some firehose/light read sources (e.g. io9, Gizmodo, Engadet) and adding in some infrequently posting must reads (e.g. Greg Linden’s shared items . NetNewsWire tells me I’m “down” to 150 feeds.
This scheme feels like it’s working a lot better though, since I usually hit at least one short window during the day when I can spend some time info grazing. When I get home, processing the remaining new items is short work.
Lastly, flagging items in NetNewsWire integrates really nicely with Google Reader, where the marked content winds up in the starred items feed. Works just like I’d expect it to. Now I have to revisit the unofficial Google Reader API Python module to slurp down my starred items for local searching.