A couple of posts that are quite interesting: one from Merlin Mann at 43 Folders and then further commentary on  that one by Jack Vinson. If you haven’t seen them, check them out! Here is Jack’s synopsis:

There’s two significant features I’ve been wishing for in my beloved newsreader, NetNewsWire [snip]

• Per-feed expirations that let me select how long I want to subscribe to the feed.
• Smarter Dinosaurs let you display any feeds that haven’t seen any activity over a period of time that you choose.

You should really read the whole posts to get the gist. Here are a few comments:

We’ve contemplated a simpler version of per-feed expirations based on some user suggestions. How about if you simply had the ability to mark any new feed as “probation” or “trial.”

I think this is really the underlying motivation for the per-feed expirations, and simpler. Any probation feed would have a little icon (a hangman?) At the end of a settable period of time, BlogBridge would simply pop up a list of expired probation feeds and ask the user which ones should be deleted, saved, or kept on probation. I think this is a simpler approach which would work better.

As far as the Smarter Dinosaurs, BlogBridge as a Feed Cleanup Wizard which is already quite smart:

You can specify any or all of these:

• Feeds that haven’t updated in the last x days.
• Feeds that I haven’t clicked on in the last X days.
• Feeds that have a minimum “BlogStarz” rating.

As you change these parameters, BlogBridge lists the feeds that match, and upon confirmation, those get deleted. By the way, Jack, you can limit this cleanup to a specific Guide if you like.

There are a couple of cool refinements in Merlin’s idea, which is that the Cleanup Wizard automatically gets run periodically, which I really like. Oh, and Merlin, BlogBridge is free, and runs very nicely on Mac OS X! Check it out!

Technorati Tags: aggregators, RSS, RSSAlley