Feeds: How Much Can You Eat?

In an interview last week with author Michael Banks for his forthcoming book, “Blogging Heroes,” the conversation naturally turned to RSS feeds. I mentioned my self-imposed feed limit is 200 sources I’m tracking on my Bloglines account. That’s my limit. All I can handle.

Interestingly, Mike’s finding 200 to be the magic number among his interview subjects. He was kind enough to share the following self-reported feed data:

* Peter Rojas (Engadget) 200

* John Neff (Autoblog) 200

* Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) 220

* David Rothman (Teleread) 200

* Brian Lamm (Gizmodo) “I’ve got about 400 blogs in my RSS feed. I should probably cut some of those out, and probably will.”

* Kristin Darguzas (ParentDish) 120. She was surprised to hear that that is a “managable” number of RSS feeds.

The feeders with an endless capacity seem to be Microsoft -related, for some reason:

* Mary Jo Foley (All About Microsoft) “I subscribe to all the Microsoft RSS feeds, all the MSDN [Microsoft Developer Network] and all the Technet blog feeds they have, which is like 4,000 bloggers. And then I have other Microsoft-related bloggers who I also have in my RSS feeds.”

* Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) “I look at 700 blogs on an average day. I’m the number one Google Reader user in the world. It shoots me 1800 items an evening.”