Blog feed massacre: Only the strong survive.

Once you discover the magic of RSS — the ability to read all your favorite blogs and news sites in one place —  you’re bound to get carried away. Within a few weeks, you’ve probably packed your Google Reader with a bustling armada of blog posts that can be downright intimidating.

That’s when it’s time to bring out the machete and start culling feeds like they’re horny teens at Camp Crystal Lake.

Recently, the delightful Irene Alvarez at Experience Columbus mentioned that she was paring back her RSS feeds, so I jumped at the chance to see what factors she considered in her blogger bloodbath.

If you’ve got a blog, and you want to keep your subscribers happy, you’d best check out Irene’s list after the jump.

The feeds I kept:
 
1. Relate to my job or my industry.
 
2. Have content that makes me laugh, makes me think, entertains me, inspires me.
 
3. Stay true to a particular focus or topic.
 
4. Are written by someone I know offline.
 
5. Have featured a post or posts that I passed along to others (thereby making me a rockstar for discovering good content). If you've done something with pass-along value even once, I'm probably hooked and hanging in to see what you'll offer up again.
 
 
The feeds I lost:
 
1. Hadn't posted in the past month or so.
 
2. Were poorly written, or simply didn't offer anything I wasn't finding among my other subscriptions (meaning I'd regularly find the info elsewhere before you blogged it, or I'd find the info more adeptly presented by another blogger).
 
3. Featured consistently loooooong posts with looooooong paragraphs and too much screen real estate taken by text. A long post is totally fair game from time to time — some topics are worthy of such thought and coverage. But if it's happening all the time, I'm out.
 
4. Were too frequently updated — too many posts in one day just overwhelms me. And if you feed everything you do into your blog (your social bookmarking activity, feeds from other blogs you read, etc), happy trails.

I think Irene really nails the best and worst of blogger behavior. Personally, I’d also add:

1. Don’t go crazy with images in your posts. One or two max. Otherwise, it comes across as a jumbled, eye-stabbing mess in RSS readers.

2. It’s OK to use excerpts in your feed (ie, the first paragraph of your item instead of the whole item), but only if you’re an advertising-supported site. Otherwise, you’re probably just driving up page views to satiate your ego. You should want visitors to become subscribers, not the other way around.

3. (A bit unrelated, but…) Don’t send me a message telling me to go subscribe to your feed. This has become a common occurrence when someone connects with you on Twitter, and it’s damn annoying. The number of RSS subscribers has become the new currency of choice for marketing-type bloggers, which is fine until people start trying to puff up their count by spamming new social networking connections.

What about you? Any pet peeves or personal preferences for which blogs you’ll let past your RSS velvet rope?

(Note: Believe it or not, today’s freaky machete photo is actually from someone’s blog post about a road trip across Malaysia. Works eerily well for a Halloween-themed post, though.)

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