I used to read all of the blogs that I was subscribed to. I was able to keep up with lessons developers were sharing, news about upcoming products and even what was going on in the lives of bloggers outside of the scope of their geekdom.
But I just can't anymore. And when I think about how I read blogs now, I wonder if that is a gauge of how everyone else reads blogs.
A few years ago, I was subscribed to a few group blogs (weblogs.asp.net and geekswithblogs) and about 40 various technical bloggers who were not part of a group. Back then the technical blogosphere was pretty light and it was possible to keep up with this. But then there was a huge change - Microsoft opened up the flood gates of blogging. Overnight, a few hundred new and very interesting bloggers were added to weblogs.asp.net. Eventually Microsoft split off to their own group blog at blogs.msdn.com where there are currently so many blogs I had to copy and paste the OPML into excel to get a number and was flabbergasted to see 2200 rows. Yes that's two thousand two hundred. I am subscribed to that entire group blog.
In addition to that, weblogs.asp.net adds another 500 bloggers to my list and I am also subscribed to 125 individual blogs and a few other group blogs (Solid Quality Learning, SQLJunkies).
So what does this mean? Basically, every time I open up my aggregator, which is less and less frequently, I am overwhelmed by the number of new posts in there. And the amount of information I am able to get out of it has shrunk to a small percentage of what I was able to absorb before the bloat.
How then, do I deal with this amount of content?
First, I scan the titles of all of the posts in the list. If a title jumps out at me, I will click on it and look at the actual post. If the post is interesting to me I will actually read the whole thing.
Next I scan the names of the authors of all of the posts. If there's someone who I want to be sure to keep up with, I will then check out that post as well.
Usually by this time, more emails are coming in or the phone is ringing and all is lost until the next time I open up the aggregator and see 200 or 300 new posts I have to deal with.
Another approach I take which is more time consuming is rather than looking at the ENTIRE list at one time, I go down the list of blogs and select each one so that I am only looking at posts by that blogger and they are not mixed in with the myriad posts. Or look at the posts by the groupings I have created. But this is still very time consuming and I might not get to the bottom of the list before some other distraction pops in.
The saddest thing is if I am chatting with one of my blogger friends and they say something about their new baby or that they just spoke at a big conference or that they have been hinting about something like LinQ in their blog for 6 months - and I didn't even know.
I know it's not just me. I can tell just by the patterns I see with my own blog - who is commenting and who is linking. Surely, everyone else is doing the same thing -- take a quick look at the title and maybe scan the actual post and maybe even really read it.
I keep thinking that I will unsubscribe to the huge group blogs and individually subscribe to some of the bloggers within those ranks. But then a post title will catch my eye that was from someone I probably would never have subscribed to and I put off the purge for another day.
How do you keep up with your blog list? How have your own reading habits changed?