I did exactly what you describe for years: skimming the headlines of my few high-volume subscriptions and marking everything as read. Even doing that was a waste of time because of those feed's very low signal-to-noise ratio. Besides those few high-volume feeds, I subscribed to dozens of low-volume feeds which all added to the chore/bore.
Skimming and picking my daily feeds usually took close to 2 freaking hours to which I added the time required to read and act upon the very few interesting items (following a couchdb tutorial takes time).
Back in 2007, IIRC, I even started work on my own feed reader (progrss.net, never went live) designed around a cool algorhythm that would filter items according to keyword frequency and manual tagging. It looked good and was an interesting change of direction UX-wise (it was less "app-y" and more "publish-y", whatever that means) but I burned out on RSS in the middle of my project's 3rd iteration.
Seriously, opening my reader (even my own prototype) in the morning and being greated by 1200 or so items was just incredibly tiring. Even with working filters.
Really, following RSS feeds was a colossal time-sink for me and switching back to the old way (consulting a few key sites daily) allowed me to focus a lot more on both my work and my familly.
Skimming and picking my daily feeds usually took close to 2 freaking hours to which I added the time required to read and act upon the very few interesting items (following a couchdb tutorial takes time).
Back in 2007, IIRC, I even started work on my own feed reader (progrss.net, never went live) designed around a cool algorhythm that would filter items according to keyword frequency and manual tagging. It looked good and was an interesting change of direction UX-wise (it was less "app-y" and more "publish-y", whatever that means) but I burned out on RSS in the middle of my project's 3rd iteration.
Seriously, opening my reader (even my own prototype) in the morning and being greated by 1200 or so items was just incredibly tiring. Even with working filters.
Really, following RSS feeds was a colossal time-sink for me and switching back to the old way (consulting a few key sites daily) allowed me to focus a lot more on both my work and my familly.