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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 :)

I only read feeds after 6 p.m. at night or before 9 a.m. in the morning or on weekends.

On the average evening I get through 3,500 to 5,000 posts and post about 100 to 150 on my linkblog at http://www.scobleizer.com

I also have a day job (answering all the email that the blog generates, giving speeches around the world, doing the video on Channel 9).

Oh, and where I have a minute or two of free time I'm also working on a book http://redcouch.typepad.com

By the way, I'm reading 1247 feeds now. And, yes, I do get through them and still have time to do other things.

I don't, however, watch TV.

Geoff is right, though. I'm very good at smelling out posts that are about cat photos. I don't read those. I only read the posts that are about technology. It also depends on your definition of "read." I'm mostly skimming looking for patterns that stick out.

Make sense?

I'll follow up on some of these comments later, thanks for taking the time to remark.

Robert, I need to spend some time doing the math on your reading feats :) but, you are obviously very good at managing information so I'm not in any way doubting your ability to process that amount of data with some variable amount of efficiency. I guess that you've managed to build a nice process and perhaps have some handy tools for processing the data from your aggregator to your linkblog more efficiently than doing the whole thing manually?

Note to self: also need to read: http://scobleizer.com/linkblog/archives/1873