The “Problem” with RSS

I’ve been using John Haller’s Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird for a while now, and it’s been great having my e-mail client and browser travel with me. I’ve loaded them on my iPod (along with some other stuff), so it’s fast and spacious.

I’ve also been using Thunderbird’s RSS reader extensively. The first time I tried it, I wasn’t organizing my feeds, and it quickly became a huge mess to keep up with everything. Now that I’m organizing everything into folders, it’s much easier to manage. There’s just one little problem …

I get the same stories all day long.

Maybe it’s because of my interests, but most of the blogs and sites that I have feeds for all link to each other, so I’ll see the same story seven or eight times over the course of the day. More when the story is very popular. This is one of the reasons I don’t even bother with a digg RSS feed …

If there’s a solution to this problem, I don’t know what it is. I know that I’ve subscribed to less than 50 feeds, and of all the stories I see every day, I actually “read” less than half, mainly because of this duplicate story problem. I can’t imagine that anyone that’s a fan of RSS isn’t dealing with this same issue, so why am I not hearing more about it? Are my interests just so limited that I’m going to have to deal with it?