Whole lotta readin’ goin’ on

I’m home sick today. I was at work sick yesterday, and I think I pushed it a little too hard, so I’m paying the price now with a swollen, sore throat.

The good news is, though, I have plenty to do. Sure there’s work I could be doing, but check this out:

That’s a helluva lot of reading to do.

I’m certainly not trying to one-up anyone, but I was inspired to do this by Brittney at Sparkwood & 21 when she pointed out that after 3 1/2 days of vacation from her regular gig at Nashville Is Talking, she had nearly 1000 unread messages in her news reader. My 2000 is about a day‘s worth, and I even spent a good hour or two reading last night.

The key difference is this: she probably reads most, if not all, of the blogs she has feeds for on a regular basis. I read a much smaller subset of them and then mark everything else as read. What I do read on a regular basis are the local blogs (and there are 56 new messages since last night), flickr comments and photo updates from friends and contacts (9 new updates since last night), local news (10 new updates since last night), and a smattering of the hundreds of other blogs and media news feeds I subscribe to for variety, such as Gawker, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and so on. And there are 1965 new items in that grouping since last night. And so much of that is going to be repeated news (how many times can I stand to read about Madonna and her new shiny new Malawian kid?) that it’s going to be tedious to plow through them all. But how else are you going to find that occasional hidden gem? The social bookmarking sites (Digg, del.icio.us, etc) haven’t really come through for me with the stuff I tend to be interested in (which is not Madge and whether or not her adoptions are crooked).

What about you? What do you read regularly vs. occasionally?