Tick, Tally, and Cull in Bloglines

April 28, 2008 8:46 AM

Within the RSS feedreader Bloglines, is there a simple method to keep track of which feeds have been most valuable?

I am wanting a way to flag or tally which feeds have been most useful to me over time. How can I rate my feed subscriptions? I want to be able to cull unproductive feeds. Marking posts as "keep new" sorta works. However, then glancing through the truly unread posts per feed becomes cluttered with all the saved posts. I've tried moving feeds into different folders based on usefulness, but that is just way too labor intensive. Adding notes inside the "edit subscription" has also been experimented with: again too labor intensive and I can not see any overall comparison. Any third party apps or undiscovered Bloglines feature that would make this task simple?

posted by chase to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

This isn't specific to Bloglines, but I read someplace (and now I forget where) that this person would add new feeds to a special folder in their feed reader, sort of giving them a trial period. If, after a few weeks, they found that they were regularly reading and enjoying the feed, they would move it to its permanent folder. If they ended up not liking the new feed after they gave it some time, they would delete it from its limbo folder, and it never got mixed up with their permanent subscriptions. So maybe a system like that would work for you - either trying out new feeds before commiting to them, or sorting them in folders based on your rating.
posted by LolaGeek at 9:22 AM on April 28, 2008

I can't think of anyway to do this with bloglines. However, if you're willing to give google reader a shot, it has a very useful "Trends" section that gives you this kind of information.

It's one of the reasons that I recently made the switch away from Bloglines.
posted by chrisamiller at 10:38 AM on April 28, 2008