I was just reading an article from SitePoint (via their RSS feed, ironically) about maximising your social media time. I thought this little snippet was kinda funny:

Be Picky: I subscribe to a lot of feeds (well over 60), but I regularly review what I have coming in, and I’m ready to unsubscribe when I lose interest.

No matter which way I think about it, “well over 60” is not “a lot of feeds”. I thought I’d take a peek into my Google Reader stats:

From your 450 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 14,149 items, starred 278 items, shared 14 items, and emailed 0 items.

Hmmm. I don’t even think of 450 feeds as a lot. Some of them are aggregated, but on the other hand some of them are status feeds (Campaign Monitor, Google Alerts, Facebook etc). I know people who subscribe to far more.

Using Google Reader, I’m able to skim through all the items and flag what I want to read – and from the stats above, 278 items flagged out of 14,149 is 1.9% – and it doesn’t take more than about half an hour. It’s one of my early morning tasks and it’s something I enjoy a lot.

Of course, I have a massive backlog of flagged items that I want to read in more depth, but I like to think I’m saving them for rainy afternoons or plane trips or something.

The content of those feeds is massively varied – from tech blogs, comic strips, food blogs and photographers to music feeds (lots of music feeds) and a surprising number of non-geek blogs.

What about you? What’s in your feed reader?