One of the things that an aggregator allows you to do is keep up with a lot more information flow. As I said earlier today, I subscribe to 315 different feeds (44 of those are search feeds). I figured it might be interesting to see how much new content there is in a day from the non-media, non-search (i.e., mostly bloggers) feeds that I track. So, I opened up a workspace in BottomFeeder and started hacking out a script:

rejects := #('*feedster*' '*blogpulse*' '*google*' '*yahoo*' '*amazon*' '*icerocket*' '*rocketnews*' '*pubsub*' '*blogniscient*' '*digg*' '*sans*' '*infoworld*' '*computerworld*' '*linux*' '*slashdot*' '*wired*' '*rss.com*' '*internetnews*' '*comics*' '*file://*' '*technorati*' '*techrepublic*' '*meetup*' '*memeorand*' '*espn*' '*cnn*' '*extreme*' '*wbal*').
today := Date today asTimestamp. 
basicFeeds := RSSFeedManager default getAllMyFeeds reject: [:each | 
	(rejects detect: [:each1 | each1 match: each url] ifNone: [nil]) notNil].
counts := OrderedCollection new.
basicFeeds do: [:eachFeed | | todays |
	todays := eachFeed items select: [:each | each pubDateString >= today].
	todays notEmpty
		ifTrue: [counts add: eachFeed displayTitle -> (todays size)]].
sorted := counts asSortedCollection: [:a :b | a value >= b value].

It's a pretty simple script - I grab all the feeds, filter out the ones that are either media or search related, and then see which ones have content today. Then I slam the results into a collection, sort by frequency, and do an inspect-it on the results. Unlike those *cough* advanced *cough* languages in the mainstream, Smalltalk lets me do this at runtime, in the running application. Kind of cool :) Anyway, I wrote a quick script to slap that stuff in an HTML table:

Now, I didn't get all the non-blogs out, but that's good enough for now - it's down to 89 feeds that way. The MARS one warrants some explanation - it's the feed off our internal bug tracking system, and we are approaching full code freeze for the next release - so activity is high. Other than that, the real outliers (i.e., lots of posts in a day) are group political blogs. Some of the high numbers are also some kind of server reset of the feed, not actual new content. That's still a problem that can fool an aggregator - especially when the feed in question doesn't have ID's for the items.

Anyway - looking at "real" results, it looks like a dozen new posts is a lot - most people are well under that. In fact, if I filter the list to those who posted 10 or fewer times so far today, I get down to 63 feeds. It turns out that the 7 (8 after this one goes up) posts today put me up near the top of that list. In fact, 23 of the feeds only have one new item so far today.

So - if you skim the high volume news/search feeds, the posts on single author blogs aren't that hard to keep up with. At least not if you use an aggregator :)