Decided to start fresh...
I stopped reading the blogs and mail groups I subscribe to several months ago but now I'm back in gear. I think the reason I stopped was because I felt overwhelmed. I missed a couple of days of reading and found myself several hundred messages behind. Not wanting to miss any exciting news, I tried reading more messages each day to catch up. But then another day went go by where I couldn't read the messages and I found myself several hundred more messages behind. Eventually, I gave up on reading blogs and mail groups all together and decided to just stick with books. I thought to myself "There is too much noise on those things mediums anyway and I can probably get more out of a well written book." To be honest, I still agree with that reasoning (I'll get back to this) but blogs and mail groups do have something special to offer that books can't. Blogs and mail groups give you perspective and connect you with your peers. The give you the benefit of thousands of eyes scouring different sources of knowledge then pointing you in the direction of the good resources. They give you an understand of what people are doing that's different than you and how people are going about doing the same things you do. Also, books are usually pretty far behind the times by the times when they come out compared to the information that's readily available to you online. All this is very valuable so I decided to do something Brad Wilson recommended I do several months ago when I complained about how far behind I was... I deleted everything and started fresh. I'm really glad I did too because now I've been pretty good about my reading of blogs and mail groups and I don't feel *as* overwhelmed by messages. Should have listen to Brad from the get go but oh well.
Getting back to the topic of "blog noise" however, I still think a well written and concise book can give you more bang for your time. The problem with blogs is that everyone and their mother has a blog!!! And people blog even with they have nothing to say just for the sake of keeping their blog active. I subscribe to a different view of how a blog should be run and I try to keep my blog up to those standards. I only blog when I have something decent enough to waste my time and other people's bandwidth (both in the literal and metaphorical sense). I hope I've been doing a good job of that. For a while, I had nothing that interesting to speak about so my blog went pretty quite. Now, however, because I changed jobs, I am getting many new perspectives on technology and I find myself wanting to share my thoughts about them more and more. It's interesting working in a place where there are far more Unix developers than Microsoft developers because my mind is being opened to new worlds in terms of my own thoughts of technology. That is something I love so there is a possibility, but don't hold me to this, that you'll see a lot more blogging out of me in the near future.
One last thing before I leave you, while I was deleting the old messages I decided to delete some blog subscriptions that I no longer was a fan of and add some new ones. One of the new one's I've added is Chris Pratley's blog as per Tim Marman's recommendation to me while we were getting a couple of drinks. Highly recommend it, high quality, low noise, just what I like :).