Cleaning out my RSS Reader

I love Google Reader and I love reading about the latest in technology, politics, you-name-it, but I have a ridiculous number of feeds and they are just too much of a time sink. I need some way to clean them out so I can have more time to do other more important things.

One idea is to borrow from a technique that I have used to get rid of new clothes: go into your closet hang all the hooks backwards. Whenever you wear a garmet hang it back up in the closet in the usual way. n months later, take the garmets that are still hung backwards and donate them to the local thrift store. I can't remember where I got this idea from, but I think it might have been from lifehacker.com (whose feed I am subscribed to).

For feeds, I was thinking maybe I could create a new label called "keeper". Whenever I read a item from a feed that feel I could not have lived without reading it, that feed gets labelled with the "keeper" label. n months later, I can toss out all the feeds that do not have the "keeper" label.

Alternatives to using feeds:

• Go to the website for the feed and look at the most popular articles in the past week or month. This isn't always possible with all feeds.
• When you need to know how to do something, just google it, rather than subscribing to a feed of how-tos (like lifehacker.com for instance). Pull rather than push.
• Go to a site like reddit.com or digg.com when you have some free time, otherwise, don't worry about all the stuff you might have missed.