«Rabbit Bread» © swruler, «Feld1» © carlsonimkellerJust kidding…

But please consider what Al wrote on his blog (saw this first as a guest posting on Stephen's great HD Biz Blog):

it is now commonplace to have hundreds of emails in the inbox daily. There are 120,000 blogs created every day. Clearly, there exists information overload, and the only way to rise above the noise is the ability to add true knowledge. Information still needs to make an impact at the knowledge level, but the management of information is getting harder. This is evolution of the Information Age, not revolution.
(Al)

Knowledge is to information as bread is to grain. So - do you need to make bread from grain yourself if all you want is to eat bread? No. Why, then, would you want to pick all the news grains from all RSS fields across the world, when all you want is the big picture?

The third part of this mini series on protecting your inbox shows you how to stay up-to-date in the blogosphere without tracking each and every RSS feed out there yourself. It's definitely not meant for Robert Scoble or others who want or need to be the first to know everything about anything (you can find out How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning and then use, e.g., LinkedFeed to find more interesting RSS feeds to subscribe to, just in case you're lacking other challenges in life).

If your goal is no longer to become the fastest harvester of feeds, but rather a connoisseur of fresh news bread, the solution is easy: go find your favorite bakers. As there are myriads of specialty bakeries, there are many types of RSS feed processing sites:

• Portals (so-called aggregators)
  Aggregators, well… aggregate. They can also aggregate other aggregators. A prominent example is popurls which presents, among others, also links from RSS buzz detectors (see below).
  Actually, aggregators are web portals in disguise, presenting windows into parallel universes without really connecting them. Looking at an aggregator doesn't make you any wiser than looking at the tickers on TV. It's slightly better than navigating to all included sites by hand, but otherwise, no gain. Stay out of these.
• RSS channelers
  Channelers actually aren't news bread bakers. They're specialized grain vendors. Have a look at Technorati Topics for an example: you can find channels like Entertainment, Technology or Politics where new blog entries dealing with the respective topic flow by, in an endless stream, unrated, unfiltered.
  Besides weeding out all other types of grain, there isn't much knowledge added in that process, though. To be precise: subsuming postings that are tagged with a fleeting number words under a stable, broad category name is what is done here. As long as you can live with such a broad category, RSS channelers at least save you the time for maintaining a list of interesting, related tags to watch.
• RSS buzz detectors & creators
  Buzz detectors spot emerging trends, based on a simple assumption: wherever more and more blogs are discussing something, a trend is about to emerge. Actually, the blogosphere has been derided as an echo chamber, where most postings are just referring to referrers who referred to something that was referred to by somebody else who referred…
  Most buzz detectors focus on a niche. Gabe Rivera's Techmeme is a good example for a technology-centered buzz detector: for every trend, you get a headline and a short snippet taken from one blog posting, plus a list of links to other blog postings that discuss the same trend or buzzword. More examples of niche buzz detectors are the celebrity-centered WeSmirch, aptly subtitled «Automatic Dirt Digger», and the politics-centered Memeorandum.
  There are extremely specialized buzz detectors, such as Frank Westphal's Rails Rivva (for software developers interested in using a specific framework of a specific programming language) or Gabe Rivera's Ballbug (exclusively for afficionados of the U.S. Major League Baseball). At the other end of the spectrum, there are very generic buzz detectors that also operate as channelers: see Tailrank, BuzzTracker or Megite, for instance.
  Some buzz detectors are also buzz creators: Rojo allows for voting on blog postings. It's like Digg for blogs only.
• Border Crossers
  Border crossers transcend the blogosphere and connect it to other worlds.
  For an example, look at Sphere, which can be thought of as a combination of Google News and Technorati Topics: for each current buzz or topic, you get links to newspapers or other traditional sources, plus a side bar pointing you to related blog postings.
  For a border crosser to be able to connect two worlds, there must be a common ground between them, obviously. In other words: border crossers can only connect via topics that the shared universe is aware of. Sadly enough, this means the Law of Raspberry Jam applies here. On the other hand, blogs rather discuss news than to create them, so the blogosphere can serve as a nice commenting add-on to whatever other world (I expect to get flamed for this nonchalant role attribution to blogs).