I read hundreds of feeds just to keep up on what was going on in the .NET Developer world, and maybe a few other things as well. I cull or re-organize them every once in a while to try to make it easier for me to keep up (it's really not possible for me to spend 2 hours a day reading feeds.) But still, I spend enough time reading RSS that I often wonder if my time would not be better spent doing things instead of just reading about other people doing things.
Recently - and some not so recent - there have been several new RSS feeds I read which do a pretty good job of summarizing all the stuff I would have read anyway:
People News Sites (sites run by flesh and blood people with names and stuff):
* Jason Haley's Interesting Finds: 70% hit rate -i.e., I would have read 70% of this stuff myself in my own set of feeds. Why am I reading my own feeds then? Jason has all the good .NET stuff, plus some career and community stuff that I wouldn't normally be exposed to.
* Larkware News: Mike Gunderlow has been doing this for years. This is one of the very first feeds I ever subscribed to, and it gets better all the time. Also a very high correlation with my personal reading preferences.
* Sam Gentile: Also been doing this for a while. His New and Notables are 90% sutff I already read in other feeds (very high correlation!) but the ones I missed are usually great reads. In fact, I probably populated a good chunk of my OPML from his new and notables. His other articles are great too.
Group/Corporate/Less-Personal sites:
* Finserv Blog: All the Finderv news in one place. Good, financial-software related blogs.
* ACM Queue: Mostly articles, really, not links, but they have some good content.
* DotNetKicks: The inspiration for this post. They have a lower hit ratio for me (compared to some things mentioned above), but they have (or sometimes have) a larger volume of links, plus the discussion part. This could almost be the one stop shop for 90% of what I want to read.
* D-Zone: DotNetKick's dad. Everything I said about DotNetKicks goes for this site as well, but they have less .NET stuff.
* MSDN Just Published: I love having read an article before my friends who wait for the magazine to come in the mail.
* TheServerSide.NET: What can I say...this is one of the original RSS Aggregator portals for .NET developers.
* digg: I'm putting them last because of the potential negative impact I get from reading this stuff. Very little of it is actually useful for anything but party trivia, and it can quickly turn into a major timesink. It is, likely, the inspiration for lots of other link aggregator sites.
So just reading what was found above (as an experiment) this morning, it took me 25 to skim through everything, which is kind of a good savings. I will still probably keep readin lots of RSS feeds, but maybe only my top 30 favorites and the above mentioned portals (ex-digg) on weekdays.