I suspect there is nothing that Newsblur can do to mitigate this problem, but the way the Drudge Report works is that every time they touch one of their links, it gets sent out again in the feed. This means that one of their links might show up in Newsblur 2, 3, or 20 times … for exactly the same link.
Setting Newsblur to not show changes, but only the final story does not help this. The Drudge feed must have some sort of cache-buster that fools readers into thinking that each version of the same link is really a new link.
This causes the Drudge feed to appear to be 25% or more of the items I receive, when actually the number of new links is much less. Perhaps this is by design on Drudge to encourage folks to go there rather than use aggregators, but as it is, I find myself marking the whole feed as “read” just to clear it out.
It seemed reasonable to mention this in case others were equally frustrated. If there is some solution to this that I have missed, please let me know.