Podcasting and Thing 11

I knew that Angela was the Queen of Podcasting, so I was not surprised to see that she had written the explanatory post for Thing 11. After reading her post and watching "Podcasting in plain English" I was ready to have a go. I went to the BBC site and subscribed to AHOW (or A History of the World in 100 Objects) as I feel that I ought to be listening to these programmes but have not really managed to so far. (Neil MacGregor's voice sounds quite different over my weedy laptop speaker, but mustn't let that put me off.) I also searched Podcast Alley for podcasts on cats (well, I searched for"Resource Description and Access" first, but no got hits). I found plenty but after trying out a few in Google Reader I decided that life is too short to spend time with some of these podcasters.

RSS feeds and a glass of wine

I went back to Google Reader this evening, with a glass of wine near at hand, to spend some more time with RSS feeds. I have to confess this was prompted by receiving a link from friends in Washington, DC, to their photographs of the recent snow storm (http://web.me.com/dcbooboobear/Site/Snowmageddon.html). I was slightly surprised to see the now-familiar RSS icon, and clicked on it to add the feed to my Google Reader.
Once "in the zone", I added a few more feeds from the Recommended Sources. That led me to wonder who recommends these sources? I checked in the Google Reader help and discovered that it's done automatically based on various factors including the feeds you're subscribed to, information from your web history and your location (see
http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80468 for more details). This strikes me as having something of the Big Brother about it, but I have to admit that the Recommended Sources were all on the money and I added all of them (including our own Digitalist) with the only exception of the graduate trainees' blog.
Looking forward to next week's Things!

Does she know her RSS from her email?

I have set up my Google Reader and have added some feeds, including some of the blogs of other 23 Things Oxford participants. I'm getting another flashback, to when I set up a Bloglines account last year (or was it 2008?) and subscribed to so many feeds I just could not keep up with them. Aren't RSS feeds just another way of feeling overwhelmed by information, like email? I gave up on the Bloglines account but did not delete it - goodness knows how many items are sitting in it now, patiently waiting for my attention...

What is the optimum manageable number of RSS feeds?

PS Apologies for the pointlessly punning title.