Am I cheating?

I love Google Reader. If I was the King of England, I would have considered an en-masse knighthood for the team that integrated Reader with Gears.
That said, any fair analysis of my RSS addiction will show that my usage has tailed-off in an inverse-hockey-stick pattern over the past few months. I suffer from an extreme case “BS Fatigue”; 487 blogs are a lot to keep up with and when most of them are trying to fill you in with the latest and greatest in design inspiration, best practices in strategic planning, game-changing management advice, low-cost ‘lifehacking’, high performance marketing, “web x.0″ to the newest concepts in resource management, your head begins to spin and you can no longer find value in all the information that is pushed in as structured XML.

I had a great conversation over lunch with a friend who equated RSS( and all information attained without having worked for it!) to cheating; he thought all this easy information kept him from having pure experiences anymore, he wants to screw up and then fix things, not do them right the first time, like the guy who did them best. I’m personally more sensible about these things but I see his point: how about not knowing something already?

People who follow Guy Kawasaki on Twitter might relate to this – calling him loud would be rude, but he is in a manner of saying, extremely enthusiastic about telling you everything about everything in the universe. Most of the stuff that Guy and his team tweet about is interesting but the question remains, is it essential?

I’ve decided to conduct a small social experiment: I’m trimming my feeds to topics of non-professional interest and to blogs belonging to personal friends only. I’ll keep it this way for a month and see if I still have cracking stories to tell when we wait for our meetings to start!

I fear my friend might have scarred me for life with his ‘knowledge is cheating’ hypothesis! Do you see his point?!

Confession: I follow Gul Panag (the movie-star?) on Twitter. I don’t know her personally.