Once upon a time a boy named tycho really hated RSS readers, they were clunky and didn't save much time because most websites didn't have feeds, and the ones that did had excerpt feeds.
Then tycho got a Mac and discovered NetNewsWire and by this time the internets had clicked over to version 2.0 and he started using RSS a lot, it saved him time and let him use even more of the internets at once, no matter where he was. And everything had RSS feeds and he was happy.
But he never unsubscribed from a feed--ever--and before he noticed, there were 520 feeds. Everytime he hit refresh on the reader, there were another 1300 items to read. Reading the internets became a nag, rather than a pleasure.
Something had to be done, and so he worked on eliminating feeds that he didn't read or didn't enjoy reading--like the ones for usenet groups, or del.icio.us tags--and slowly but surely he was able to limit the number of subscriptions to 270. This meant that whenever he hit refresh there were about 300 items to read. He was happy.
That's more like it!
With luck I can weed a few more out and hopefully this will help me become a better blog citizen. If I'm reading fewer things, hopefully I'll be able to read more throughly and be able to respond more often, but I'd like to be able to get it down some more.