Blogebrity makes a big deal about the fact that Robert Scoble reads 743 feeds in his aggregator.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s official–Robert Scoble is the Wilt Chamberlain of RSS consumption.

Huh?

Once and for all…the number of feeds one has in one’s aggregator just doesn’t matter.

Look at it this way… Let’s say The Sunday New York Times is 750 pages if you include all the ads, magazine and the classifieds. That’s a total guess…I have no idea how many pages the paper is. It’s a huge paper. That’s the point. I may spend 3 hours sitting at my dining room table reading the paper. Do I read every single word on every single page? No. Never. I doubt anyone does. But we all say that we “read the paper this morning.” We read certain pages word by word. We skim others. We skip other pages completely. We make reading decisions based on our mood. One Sunday I may read every single page in the Travel section, the next week Arts & Leisure hold my interest longer. All in all, it doesn’t take much to get a sense of what’s going on in the world and what’s important enough to grab your attention at any given moment. If you come across multiple references to the same front page story, you’re likely to make a point of going to the front page to read that story.

Think of your aggregator as your own personal Sunday New York Times. The difference is that you compile the content yourself. It’s just that simple. Screaming “Robert Scoble reads 743 feeds” or “Judi Sohn reads 655 feeds” is meaningless. It’s how you process that information that matters, not how you read it…or how much.

Scoble’s point is that RSS changes the way information is delivered and absorbed in a way that simply wasn’t possible before. Going back to my newspaper analogy, reading websites one-by-one the way Yahoo says 96% of folks do it is akin to reading The New York Times off a bulletin board wall one page at a time. RSS is the newspaper being wrapped in a plastic bag and dropped on your doorstep so you can read it while still in your pajamas.