“Hi, my name is John, and I’m addicted to news.” It’s true, I used Netscape’s old portal because they allowed you to pull RSS feeds and put them in boxes that were of the same status as blocks of information they supplied. After Netscape lost interest in that, I wrote my first RSS aggregator HotSheet because I wanted to pull a dozen or more feeds and get them in one “stream of news”. Now it’s about five years down the road from the earliest RSS stuff I can remember and RSS feeds are available for just about every website that updates regularly. Many people get them automatically with their weblogs simply because the tools they use (WordPress, Blogger, etc.) create them by default. So I monitor a large number of weblogs and other news sites via RSS and occassionally people ask me for a complete list of everything I subscribe to. So now you are going to see the depth of my addiction…
I roughly divide these up into the following categories: Comics, Java, Podcasting, Weblogs, and Misc. I’m using JetBrains Omea Reader 2.0 to read them right now but I’m not really enamoured with it. It’s just better than several others I’ve tried. How’s that for an endorsement 🙂
Here’s the complete list of everything I’m subscribed to as well as an OPML file containing all the URLs to subscribe to the various RSS feeds:
- Ars Technica
- 0xDECAFBAD Blog
- Articles published in Ruby Code & Style
- Boing Boing
- Cafe au Lait Java News and Resources
- ClientJava.com
- digg
- Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
- Dilbert
- Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend
- Flapper’s Folly
- Google Blogoscoped
- Jive Forums RSS Feed
- Jon Lipsky’s Weblog
- Jon’s Radio
- Many-to-Many
- microformats
- Mokka mit Schlag
- Moroccan Role
- News.blog: Google (CNET News.com)
- Nifty News and Decent Deals (decentdeals.net)
- O’Reilly Radar
- PaidContent.org
- Paper Forest
- Penny Arcade
- Podcasting News
- PvPonline
- PVRblog
- Romain Guy’s Weblog
- The RSS Weblog
- Sci Fi Wire
- Slashdot
- this WEEK in TECH – your first podcast of the week is the last word in tech
- Waxy.org Links
- You’re It!
Is it any wonder I want to create next generation applications that filter down this mess to something you can actually read? Some channels barely have any traffic at all, others have a dozen or more per day. As an aggregate I’d guess there is more than a hundred items per day from them at the moment and it’s slow because of the holidays. If you add a feed like JavaBlogs to this mix you can figure on several hundred more just from it because it aggregates more than 1500 weblogs together itself.
JohnMunsch.com 
Heya John – I too have had this problem – trying to keep up with my RSS feeds and having my head buried in my reader for hours on end trying to bring my ‘unread items’ count down to 0 only to have new items flood in every hour!
I decided to write a gadget with a friend of mine that made RSS reading something you could do while you were working on other things. We made a persistent desktop gadget that can alert you to new items in various ways depending on how important that item is to you.
You can tell it how important items are based on a number of bias rules you can set up.
Would love to hear what you think! You can check out the page at http://www.touchstonegadget.com.