Google Reader Scraped Clean

This morning I scraped my Google Reader subscriptions clean by unsubscribing from all feeds (1, 161 to be exact).

I then selected and added back just a few feeds. (33 to be exact)

Why did I jump off of this proverbial cliff?  Several reasons:

• I just do this kind of thing once in awhile.  Almost year ago I erased my entire blog and started over.
• Google Reader seems to get cranky when I add too many feeds.  I have been getting errors in the mobile reader, errors in the normal reader, and couldn't even view my stats anymore.  I think these problems are compounded by unread feeds and feeds that are high volume.
• I have been becoming bored by the content that I have been receiving through Google Reader.  I think this is largely a product of changing tastes, just like with food, some feeds no longer suit.  It is also a product of my subscribing habits (more about that later).
• I knew I could leave myself a safety line thanks to the wonders of OPML.  I saved my subscriptions down to my hard drive and then loaded them back into a Grazr Reading List.  I then added a widget containing the Grazr Reading List as a page to my blog.  I also loaded the OPML file into Feedhub and AideRSS and added the resulting feeds back to Google Reader.  Theoretically, I will receive the best posts that are coming through from my old feeds without having to maintain them in Google Reader.  Nothing is lost that can not be recovered.

I suspect that quantity of subscribed feeds will grow quickly from 33 because of my subscribing habits.  As I come across great new posts while reading on my mobile Google Reader reading list, I am in the habit of subscribing to blog feeds that generated the post that I liked and probably shared.

How will I find great new posts with only 33 feeds you may ask? More importantly how could I (and did I really) give up my shared items feeds? The answer of course is by subscribing to feeds coming from FriendFeed, Feedheads, LinkRiver, RSSmeme, and Twitter.  I may no longer be subscribing directly to great shared items feeds like LouisGray's shared items feed and Robert Scoble's shared items feed but I still get them through LinkRiver and FriendFeed.