Big Fish, Small Fish: RSS feeds

As I've progressed through my recent culling of feeds. (I used to subscribe to almost 500 RSS feeds, now I'm down to about 75, after getting bellow 50). I've been thinking about the kinds of blogs that I read regularly, and that I'm interested in expending time reading.

Seems to me that the crux of this argument boils down to:

• read the a-list and professional publications because this is the way to "stay on top of the news," in a quick and efficient sort of way.
• avoid reading a list blogs and sites because you're more likely to find new/interesting/unique reading, (and more of it) if you're not busy keeping up to date with BoingBoing and slashdot, say.

I'm going to post a copy of my OPML file (that is the export file from my news reader, that you can import to any news-reader around,) so you can see what I'm reading. I recommend all these sites. Here it is. It's zipped, and it doesn't include this site's feed, to which you should of course subscribe. The organization of the list is somewhat idiosyncratic, admittedly.

I think this pondering this in part with the launch of io9. On the one hand I really like the concept, I think conceptually Gawker is a force of good, and the posts are good. [1] On the other, it doesn't feel very of the people.

And clearly I go back and forth on this a lot. I read BoingBoing more or less, and I have typically listened to TWiT podcasts. So who knows. I don't have an answer here.