More on (no that's 2 words) blog processing

Over the weekend I posted an article about blog reading; specifically, I suggested that it's inefficient to attempt to keep up with a large number of blogs. 

    http://weblogs.asp.net/dneimke/archive/2005/02/20/376744.aspx

William Luu responded with:

> I guess you could say the Robert Scoble is insane reading in excess
> of 1000 blogs.

> Not to mention being subscribed to various aggregated sites such as
> weblogs.asp.net/blogs.msdn.com/dotnetjunkies.com etc...

> As well as picking up posts via PubSub which return results on
> keywords that he specifies (sometimes this amount can be quite substantial).


My response to a question such as this is... when do you suppose that Mr. Scoble does this activity?  Does he do this on top of a job description which looks like yours or mine for example?

Here, try this...  subscribe to 1000 blogs + all that other stuff.  Sit down each day and process this information.  Time it.  Now tell me... how many things did you just NOT do?

Reading and keeping up with information via blogs is a new and important activity.  Don't, however, let yourself and your customers down by spending exhaustive amounts of your (and theirs) time by overloading yourself with data.

If I was Mr Scoble, I'd consider having 2 .opml feeds set up.  One I'd read only during the week and it would contain a very small number of blogs.  The other can contain as many as can be comfortably consumed while eating my Saturday morning's breakfast - and that's the only time that it would ever get loaded up!

2 Comments

  • I totally agree.



    However, blogs are just another "distraction" along with phone calls, email messages, instant messaging, webcasts, etc. that need to be managed during the day/week. Because I work out of my home and am a stay-at-home dad, I am even more sensitive to the amount of time I spend on such "discretionary" activities. However, as you suggested, for some people blogging is their job, which is a totally different story.



    I, personally, only look up from my project work a couple of times a day to quickly flag those blog posts that look interesting for later and print out 1 or 2 posts if any that are worth digesting at night while reading in bed. During those times I am working, all external communications is turned off as I like to work in 2 hour blocks of solitude, which is more rare than diamonds with 3 children :)

  • I agree with what you're saying, but at the same time there's something that needs to be considered.



    See, I subscribe to roughly 200 different blogs. And really, I find this no big deal. The biggest thing for me is to make sure that I'm kept up to date on all posts. When I get up in the morning i turn on my home computer and get all the latest entries downloaded to my machine (since i'm turning it on anyway to do a quick email check) - this is just so I have them. With aggregate sites like weblogs.asp.net only giving the last 30 or whatever, it's easy to miss out on some between updates when there's a large delay like sleeping :)



    when i get home from work i turn on the computer again and get it updated with the last 9 hours or whatver posts.



    The sometime that evening i'll sit and read them all.



    But here's the trick - i don't read anywhere near all of them. What i'm doing is ensuring that I have them should i need them. I actually read properly a small percentage of what i'm subscribed to - generally the subject line is enough to tell me if it's a post i'm interested in reading.



    Many posts are repeats of posts i've already read (for example, CS 1.0 was announced over the weekend...this was immediately followed by every man and his dog saying 'hey look what i just read'. i didn't read any of these repeats). There's also a lot that jsut aren't interesting to me - posts about sharepoint, mom, other technologies that i just have nothing to do with. So i skip over them all and mark them as immediately read.



    But doing this allows me to find the little gems in between the boring ones.



    So that's my two cents - just because I subscribe to a whole lot of blogs, i actually read a small proportion of them. It doesn't take long to weed through the crap :)



    I consider it the same as taking the time every day to sit and read the newspaper (I don't read the newspaper, but others do). If i did, there's no way I'd read the whole thing cover to cover. I'd scan teh headlines of each story and only read the ones that looked interesting. Generally for me, of course, all i end up reading is the tv guide, the comics, and the IT section, but that's just different :)

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