Alan Mathison Turing was born June 23, 1912. He developed theories in the 1920s about a “digital computer” which would be a machine that could answer just about any mathematical problem. He helped crack the Enigma code. He is the father of computer science. He was persecuted (and prosecuted) for his homosexuality. He committed suicide just before his fifty-second birthday by eating a poisoned apple. He is the biggest single reason—more than Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates—that you are reading this very sentence.

He would have been 96 today.

Happy birthday, Dr. Turing, and thank you.

I’ve been using Google Reader for a while now and I’ve been very happy with it. However, I’ve recently started falling into the trap of feed overload. I find myself skimming stuff just to get through the massive number of feeds and I feel like I might be missing what I really like. As a result, I’ve just reorganized my feeds in Google Reader.

My feed groups (or tags, as Google Reader calls them) used to be organized by category, thusly:

• Big Blogs
• Comics
• Friends
• Librarianship
• Nerditude
• Photocasts
• Politics
• Web Design

Unfortunately, I was subscribed to more than a hundred feeds and it’s just not possible to keep up with that much information. Few people can, in fact, because although topical organization has benefits, the big problem is that there’s no way to differentiate between feeds in a particular topic that you follow religiously and ones you just skim through.

So I’m trying out Merlin Mann’s priority-based feed groups idea for a while. I’ve rearranged my feeds into three groups, nicknamed after the cards dealt in Texas Hold-‘em poker:

1. The Flop: The stuff I follow very closely and read in detail. There are 24 feeds in The Flop.
2. The Turn: The stuff I like, but that I can read a little more loosely. There are 38 feeds in The Turn.
3. The River: The stuff that I’m interested in, but that I can freely skim or skip altogether. This group is for the feeds for which I can click “Mark all as read” without guilt. There are 13 feeds in The River.

There was also a substantial culling of old feeds that hadn’t updated since mid-2007. I think I unsubscribed from thirty or forty old feeds that were just hanging around.

I’m going to be testing this new system out over the next few weeks, reading feeds and moving them up and down in priority as I realize how much I read things. It will be interesting to see how this changes my reading habits. I’m also contemplating—as per Merlin, once again—a fourth group, called “on probation” or something similar, which will be for feeds that get on my nerves (e.g., infrequently read, update once every six months, post lots of pictures of cats with funny sayings in large impact fonts, low content, etc.) and are in danger of being unsubscribed.

(P.S.: Of particular note was my subscription to Digg’s “all news” feed, which has long since become a cesspool of stupid links and people putting “BREAKING” in their headlines. I unsubscribed from that god-awful trash-feed and re-subscribed to just the Digg Technology feed in an attempt to get away from the stupidity. Time will tell how well I have succeeded in that. Digg may, in fact, end up as the first probationary feed.)