Ever open up your RSS reader only to be greeted with a collection of posts that feels like an episode of prepubescent Survivor (Sorry to international readers, that is an American TV reference). Whining, name calling, immaturity are all the rage nowadays, especially from so-called “professional” bloggers that seem more interested in their analytics package than providing decent content. Here’s a few rules that I use for pruning my subscriptions that others might find useful:

1. If you’re blog is named after yourself, that’s one strike. Having a domain name named after yourself is fine (exempt myself?), but a blog should be about a subject, and unless you’re posting about your dating life and the consistency of your cat’s shit in the litter box (which may or may not overlap each other), your blog title should suggest a subject as well.
2. If you’ve posted about a meaningless internet pissing match (a trivial contest in which a group of people stand in a line and see who’s urine can travel the most in-air distance), that’s big strike number two. You’re polluting my subset of the internet. You know what I’m talking about because we’ve all read those train wrecks.
3. If you’re constantly plugging something that is not interesting, say goodbye. I don’t mind it if you’re talking about something that actually has value. I love reading Ask the Wizard, because he’s actually writing about something useful, not just plugging FeedBurner (not that he’d need to).

Now take a moment to consider which blogs in your feed reader might match these criteria. Then indulge yourself and consider what actual value these blogs provide. If you like the entertainment of a good cat fight, by all means, keep reading. But if you’re like me and find yourself with the conclusion that these blogs don’t provide a wrinkle to the gray matter between your ears, I would encourage you to go into your feed reader and unsubscribe. The best thing you can do with a troll is to ignore them completely.

What blogs do you stay away from? (Titles only please, no links)

Broadcasting Text (HTML and Websites) -> Music (Shoutcast and Internet Radio, Podcasts) -> Video from a Home Computer (Youtube)
Reading Text (Ebooks, Sony Ebook Reader) -> Listening to Music (I-Pod) -> Watching Video (I-Pod, Portable DVD players) on a Mobile Device anywhere you go
Broadcasting Text (Twitter) -> Music (Zune?) -> Video (Justin.tv for everyone?) from a Mobile Device anywhere you go

But they really need to adjust their robots.txt files to stop spiders from crawling the status of every one of their users. Today I did a search for YUI DataSource and got the following Google Link headline:

Twitter / Lee Shepherd: just finished extending YUI…

What sort of value is this going to provide to anyone?