Many of my regular readers will be familiar with Toluu because I have linked to it quite a bit, especially in my RSS Reset articles.  Toluu is a useful, unique utility that allows you to build a portfolio of RSS feeds that you subscribe to, and then using a matching algorithm, receive recommendations for feeds that you might like and other Toluu users that have similar tastes as you.

My use of Toluu has grown these past few weeks to the point where it has become a permanent addition to the list of useful sites I hit almost every day.  So imagine how pleased I was to hear that Toluu was going to add some great new features today!

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Update: Post pulled for inaccuracy.  Sorry about that!  When it comes to stats I’m still learning.  Thanks to Louis for setting me straight.  However, FeedCompare is still a useful utility that you should check out.

I was re-reading yesterday’s post about RSS Reset and, since I included the live FeedBurner counters in my post, I noticed that many of them seemed slightly higher.  I decided to drop them in to FeedCompare and see the trending. …

About a week ago, Corvida and I kicked off a plan that is now known as RSS Reset.  In my original post, I said I would check back periodically and let you know how I was doing.  And here we are!

In the first followup post, I listed the 40-odd subscriptions I felt could survive the cut (and that I was still interested in following).  I’m not going to re-list all of them here, but let’s touch on the changes:

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I already have news about the little RSS reset project that I kicked off earlier today!

Corvida

Corvida has made her move over at ReadWriteWeb.  Hopefully we will get some more enterprising souls to give the project a go.

Caleb

Caleb Elston, the creator of Toluu, has been a strong supporter of this move.  He has decided to join us and should announcing this on his blog!  Welcome, Caleb! Be sure to check out his FriendFeed Room if you need help or have questions.

Also, he has hooked me up with a bunch of invites to Toluu.  So if you want to experience it for yourself, please email me at phil(at)scribkin.com and I’ll shoot one off to you. See you there!

TechMeme

Although not exactly in the same category as above, my post was featured on TechMeme!  At this point, it’s no longer front-page news, but that’s ok because I took a screenshot.

More after the break…

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Tonight, I was chatting with Corvida, and the topic of RSS feed overflow came up.  We were both frustrated because there was so much new (potentially great) content being produced every day, that we couldn’t keep up!

A radical new plan was hatched that we both agreed to abide by, starting today.  We would dump all our RSS feeds out of Google Reader and only add new feeds based on a set of rules:

1. Keep feeds that track web site buzz (business-impacting).
2. Allow feeds such as Disqus, Intense Debate or other low-volume feeds that are necessary for timely work decisions.
3. Allow adding as many Google Reader Shared Items feeds as needed.
4. Allow adding of aggregate, smart or keyword-filtered feeds such as RSSmeme FriendFeed Friends or TechMeme.
5. Allow adding smaller site feeds.  We set the upper limit for a small site to be 200 at the time of adding.  This can be re-visited if the number is too small.
6. Allowance process: If a site feed is so unique that it is not being covered by the processes defined above, an allowance will be made to subscribe to a direct feed to any site.  The number of allowances can not exceed 10.

This plan will be in effect for 1 month.  We will be dumping our current profiles on Toluu and will make sure it stays in sync with our new OPMLs.

In addition, I will make sure any feed I add gets sent as a tweet from Toluu and I will try to re-visit my feed list week during the month and explain any additions or changes.

I am completely open to suggestions for small, quality site feeds inside or outside the realm of social media as well as links to any google reader shared items feeds!

I’m looking forward to this excitement, both because it hopefully will make my RSS feed reading more manageable, but also because I am adding a huge social filter in to the mix.  I am expecting the best reads to be more visible, while still keeping an eye on the little guy.

If you like to catch up on your favorite sites using a feed reader, you are most likely using Google Reader or Bloglines. If you prefer an offline (installable app-based) feed reader, you may be using Newsgator’s FeedDemon or some other standalone app. However, in this article I will introduce you to 5 ways of reading your favorite feeds that you may not have thought about!

… rss2email, which is an open source project that uses Python …

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