There’s an episode of Stargate Atlantis where scientist Rodney McKay falls prey to an Ancient device that essentially turns him into a walking library. He gains a vast, encyclopedic knowledge of nearly anything imaginable, which, while cool, is eventually revealed to result in DEATH if the condition is allowed to continue. Of course, in the ususal Stargate fashion, some deus ex machina saves the day, and everyone can go eat cake.

But, you know that feeling, that idea that your head is going to explode deliciously-cherry-coloured brains all over the walls if you don’t stop the flow of information? This is how I feel when looking at my RSS feeds. And damn, are there a lot of them. So the question remains – how do I sort all this crap?

At a glance, I can see my Ars Technica feeds, my BBC feeds, Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, Engadget, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, and a myriad of other sites and sounds filling up my reader. To be fair, I enjoy reading through them each day, yet it’s no small task going through each to find what I deem worth reading – and more importantly, worth remembering. This has become a little more difficult now that I actually have to keep track of things for the NSH podcast.

So, what’s a writer to do? Flag things, of course. One of the perks of using Mozilla Thunderbird as my primary RSS feed means that I can quickly mark whatever interests me, and then sort it out later when needed. It’s the same sort of system that Thunderbird’s core mail functionality employs, so it’s only natural the same feature make its way over to Mozilla’s reader. Even better, I can make folders to house each week’s starred items, which makes saving important weekly news and reviews that much easier.

I’ve dabbled with Google Reader briefly (who my friend Matthew Demers swears by, might I add), which has similar flagging functionality, but there’s something about having it all there beside my mail that makes Thunderbird’s implementation rather appealing. Sure, there’s better readers out there, and more functional ones at that, but these seems to suffice – for now. At the very least, it’s made it a lot easier to fend off the information overload that attacks me from the shrubberies of cyberspace each week.

That being said, I’m always looking for new ways to keep all my data in line, so if you’re using an RSS reader/plugin/whatever that you think would fit my needs, give me a shout! Suggestions always welcome.