What immediately springs to mind is the advice/admonition/complaint of a good friend's ex-girlfriend. He was and is the sort of person who has been saved by digital technologies because his paper address book would have weighed far too much to lift. And he was and is excellent at keeping all those friendships up. His girlfriend's complaint was that this sociability meant he didn't have enough time for everything, and he ended up being far too busy. She put it like this: Chris, you've just got to rationalise your friends. (She ended up rationalising him, but hey)

"Rationalising" in a social context sounds harsh. Perhaps a less emotive way of treating the subject is to focus on Lee Bryant's advice to manage channels not content. And this applies, I think to both technical and behavioural solutions.

Behavioural is straightforward: there isn't time to read everything, there certainly isn't time to digest everything you might be able to read, there comes a point when you just have to trust your own brain. (i.e rationalising your content.) Equally, and this is personal prejudice, there needs to be a balance between life online and life off. Addiction ain't good. Put another way, one behavioural solution would be pretty close to the words at the oracle at Delphi: know thyself and nothing in excess". Another would be little and often, or a variant on the best practices for how to cope with email.

Technical are a little harder. Essentially, though, to manage channels and feeds sensibly we need to have some more strategic tools for them (or at least more strategy built in to our tools.) Here are some starters for ten (based on the problems I have) - they may be outdated, and example of my ignorance, or equally there may be more:

• Clustering
Often I skim through a lot of items in different channels commenting on the same thing. The folksonomy shebang was a case in point. References to the same articles came up in channel after channel. Reading through each of these felt a little silly. What would have made more sense would have been for my aggregator to scan my incoming articles for say "links to that article". Then to present me, say at the end of the week, with a list of the most commented upon articles (in the channels I subscribe to) and a synopsis of who is commenting on them.
• Monitoring my interests
The feeds I subscribe to have differing levels of interest to me at different times. Some are business-oriented, some academic, some a mixture and some personal. Each of these feeds has a better or worse "hit-rate" with me. Some are continually interesting, some impact on my day-to-day work, some I subscribed to because they had a similar bee in their bonnet about something but they've since gone on to pastures new and, while wishing them well, I don't particularly want to go with them. I "know", pretty much, who they are, but what I'd like is this. Rather than having to manually sort these all out, I'd like my aggregator to monitor my interests, even if just in a simple way. I'd like my aggregator to remember how many items per update I click on to find out more, and order the feeds for me. That way, if nothing else, I get a clear indicator of who to "rationalise".
• Combining feeds
Del.icio.us is great. It combines a lot of feeds under, say, the events tag. But if there's a personal view of the world I'm interested in, I don't want to have to subscribe to their blog and their links. Equally, if people write on more than one blog, I don't want to have their "voice" spread around my aggregator. I want an easy way, if I'm subscribed to say Einstein's blog to add his delicious links (whole or as a category) to that feed. What I have subscribed to is his views and interests, and I want those views and interests, whether blogged or bookmarked, to be wrapped up as one, pre-packaged, ready for easy consumption.
• Journalists vs columnists
Some feeds have all the links. God knows how they have the time to unearth all these different sources, but there are some feeds that seem to consistently unearth new sources of information or news pieces. Let's call them journalists, if that isn't to perjorative. Other feeds have thoughtful pieces that link to one or two sources and then write about that. Let's call them columnists. My mode of reading is very different for the two, and the length of time I have to pay attention to what they're saying needs to be bigger for columnists than it does for journalists. Surely my aggregator should be able to categorise these for me? Perhaps by analysing the number of links out per feed - more links out tends to imply more of a journalist, fewer tends to imply more of a columnist? Of course, many feeds will blend both. And I don't know how you'd cope with that.
• Identifying Groups of channels
There are groups of feeds. The obvious ones are group blogs such as Many-To-Many, but there are others - it's all good social stuff. People who have met each other face to face, for instance, may well be more inclined to reference each other and follow what the other is saying. Anyway, if I'm outside those groups, I'd like to see some idea of them in my aggregator. I'd like to see that Tom, Dick and Sally often comment on each other's writings. Again, this could well be done by cross-referencing the links my feeds give out and the items I'm taking in. I'd like especially to combine this sort of feature with the clustering of hot topics mentioned in the first bullet and so to see, given any topic of interest, what the usual suspects are saying, and who's got some different opinions.

I want never gets, but I'd love to be told that I'm just ignorant and everyone else is already doing this. The second bit at any rate. Equally if there are any other ways that help you manage feeds more effectively, some pointers would be very much appreicated.