I just subscribed to 60 blogs via RSS and maybe you should, too

Over the past years, I have been outsourcing increasing parts of my news/content discovery to the social web, following the famous mantra “If it is important, it will find me”. Today I am changing course.

I decided that I want to decrease the reliance on my social graph for what I read. Both Facebook and Twitter have entered a difficult period when it comes to the sharing and distribution of news. For Facebook, its enormous power, influence and tendency to create algorithmic echo chambers is turning into a burden, with hard-to-predict consequences. Twitter on the other hand suffers from all kinds of strategic and systemic problems, nicely summarized in this post. Some kind of radical change will be necessary for Twitter to survive and thrive.  

I am currently taking a break from Twitter (except from DMs), but thanks to Nuzzle, I still can benefit from other people sharing links on the network (even though I feel a bit like a leecher now). There are plenty of other apps and services that are great for finding interesting things to read, such as the one I am working for, Scope (targeting the German-speaking region).

Nevertheless, as a passionate curator, I realize that I have to become better again at subscribing to individual blogs and media sites via RSS, for example through Feedly (or alternatives). Keeping an eye on hundreds of small and leading websites and blogs through RSS has been the backbone of my online news consumption and news curation for more than 10 years. Now that social media is showing signs of trouble, it is time to invest again into this backbone, and to aggressively grow the number of subscribed feeds.

Therefore, I crawled all the URLs that I have ever linked to from this blog since its launch almost 2 years ago (thanks Markus of hackr.de for instructions), put them in a txt file, visited them all and subscribed to about 60 blogs which I hadn’t in my Feedly subscriptions yet. Thanks to almost 100 editions of my weekly link list (you can get it for free via email here, 250 others are already doing that), the list got pretty long. I am sharing it with you in case you yourself want to strengthen and widen your RSS consumption again.

Here is the raw txt-file. The focus is mostly on tech, innovation, future and startups. Ignore the numbers. Not all URLs are working, and some are not related to reading content. But the majority is.

P.S. what I noticed: The majority of the people behind the blogs in that list are male. I want to ensure diversity among my sources. If you know of some good blogs focusing on the topics mentioned above, written by women, please share in the comments or email me. Thanks.

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