I made it through the Read It All challenge.

Sort of.  It’s more like I “ran” a marathon but got a ride on a golf cart for at least 6 of the 26 miles.

I focused pretty exclusively on the feeds that I consume within Google Reader.  I did not follow my Google Buzz items with the same diligence.

I started the week at around 300 subscriptions.  I’m currently at 284 (except that I have no idea how Google Reader calculates that number and I expect it may be highly inflated).  I suspect most of those blogs are infrequently published at best.

Here are a few observations:

1. Actually going through all of my feeds and every item was painful, at least at first.  I’d built up a habit of looking at the number of unread items and just marking them all as Read (although I would sometimes glance at the headlines before doing the mass Read).
2. If a blog didn’t publish a full feed and I only saw a partial feed in Google Reader, I just read the partial feed information.  If I found it interesting, I clicked on to the actual blog.  That didn’t happen very often.
3. This exercise is forcing me to acknowledge something that I’ve known for awhile, but refused to admit to myself:  I don’t get a lot of value out of Google Shared items.  I don’t like the way that the same item appears in Shared items multiple times when different people share it and/or leave comments on the Shared item.  I also get a lot of tech news items in there which really don’t interest me these days.  So I’m probably going to stop following some people’s Shared items (alas).
4. I might have discovered a few interesting tidbits through all of this reading, but not that many.  Sadly.
5. Then there’s the problem of the Starred Items in Google Reader, the ones that you mark but never seem to get back to because it seems like too much work to do it…  fortunately I didn’t add many new Starred items this week.  I’m considering nuking them all, if I can.

After all this, I’m going to:

• Cut back on my feeds even more.
• Stop following some people’s Google Shared items.
• Try to make more of an effort to read the stuff in Google Reader.
• Force myself to go through all of my Starred items and finally deal with them one way or another.

Thanks to Justin and Ian for coming up with this idea.  It was worthwhile, even if it wasn’t very fun at times.

I’ve been trying like the dickens to be faithful to #readitall (see my previous post for some details) but man, it’s tough.

There have been some times when, if the blog doesn’t post a full text RSS feed, I’ve just looked at the summary and said, “OK, that’s enough for me.”

I probably broke the rules a bit, but I’ve deleted one feed from my reader.  As it turns out, it:

a)  tends to duplicate entries (it’s a feed from one of the Alltop groups)

b)  contains some links to premium content that I can’t read anyway

c)  contains some feeds that I subscribe to elsewhere

So what’s the point of continuing on with that one?

One thing that I’ve noticed, at least more clearly, is that Google Reader Shared Items actually makes up a huge portion of the content I see in Google Reader.  Read It All is forcing me to pay much closer attention Shared Items than I have in the past.  I’m certainly getting a much better handle on what I’m really interested in reader.  It also highlights one thing about Google Reader Shared Items which has always annoyed me:  if multiple people Share the same item, it appears as separate entries instead of aggregating everything together.  I can sort of see why it works that way, but it’s a bit annoying to me to encounter the same story more than once, especially if it’s just a Share with no additional comments.

I’d say this is a worthwhile experience overall and I’ll definitely be making some changes to my content consumption habits after this (if not sooner).

So I know of these two crazy young guys:  IanMRountree and Justin Kownacki.  They have this vision for a week long project called #readitall.

They describe this challenge in two separate posts, but here’s the gist of the challenge:  you have to read everything you subscribe to:  blogs, magazines, etc.

This is kind of a daunting thought, considering how many blogs that I subscribe to and how often some of them publish material.  And it brings forward a good point:  there’s an awful lot of it that I don’t read regularly.

So I’m going to make the effort this week and see what I discover.

Are you in?