Efficient blog-reading
I ran into an interesting list while reading Rough Type, the 100 blogs you should read (if you had to read just 100). The list “seeks to minimize the amount of time a person has to invest in reading blogs while ensuring that the person gets the fullest possible sense of what’s going on in the blogosphere at any given moment.”
Comparing that to my reading habits, well, as I previously have written, I follow only 30 subscriptions, and of those, only 2 are in the efficient list (Guy Kawasaki & Rough Type). And then there’s reddit, but I don’t follow that as a feed.
There are couple things to point out here. A quick look at the Carnegie-Mellon researchers’ list shows that many of the blogs are really US-centric, so not much use for any European I’d guess. The other thing is that I do not follow what’s going on in the blogosphere. I think I get along pretty well with my 30 chosen blogs/feeds and stay on top of things that are important to me. Sure, there’s quite a lot of overlap. You know, that would be an interesting thing to study, what blogs could I throw away, because of that overlap.
How did your blog-following habits compare to the study I mentioned above (ie. did your favourite blogs make the cut?). The other question I’d like to ask you, the audience, is how you keep up with what’s going on (either *on* the net or *through* the net) and how do you keep that process efficient?
PS. Is it just me, or why I find it impossible to work on my blog postings in Wordpress with Safari 3 beta?
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To answer your question, which I haven’t forgotten, just delayed, very few of my favourite blogs are on that list. The concept of efficiency is fascinating however, but my idea of it is very different from how that list was constructed.
Efficiency means not to get as much information into your blog-reader as possible, but as much targeted information as possible.
I’ve, some months ago, switched to Netvibes, because of the interface and for the tabbed pages. I now segment my reading into areas that are relevant to my life, and place relevant blogs and news-sources on different pages. For me, these are “communication/general news,” “retail,” “food,” “marketing,” “tech,” and “fun.” As you may have guessed, tech is the broadest area and the hardest to condense—though at some point I expect to restrict that to more logistics-related stuff.
What’s also incredibly helpful in blogs (if they design for it), is to just subscribe to tags, categories, or certain authors. There are some excellent sites out there, but I prefer to just read stuff tagged marketing, or retail, or business, to turn down the flow of senseless information, so to speak.
Finally, what I like to do on my blog , to help myself and my readers, is to hold monthly summaries of everything I’ve written about, and a weekly condensing of the bookmarks I saved for my blog. This helps me, and hopefully my readers, to prioritise data and also see it as part of a greater whole, which for me is learning about and creating beautiful things.
I truly believe we are undergoing a new evolution of knowledge, and that this sharing of information will have consequences on our global society, for decades if not longer. But, in order to be productive in our chosen specialisms, it is necessary to restrict that flow to the subject that make us grow as individuals professionals, to be responsible as both content-consumers and content-creators.
(My answer is so long, I could’ve probably written this up as a blog-post, but here goes.)