The Blog Diet

In my continuing quest to simplify my life and feel less discouraged by all the things I can’t Get Done, I have been weeding through my blog feeds. I currently have 67 feeds coming in to my Bloglines account, and even that is after some serious deleting.

At first I loved the idea of a feed reader. It meant I only had to read a blog if that blogger posted something new, and as my list of blogs grew, this became important. But then, my list of blogs became so overwhelming that I soon had dozens of blogs with 100 or more posts that were unread, and all that BOLD font as I opened my account only served to remind me of what wasn’t getting read.

You will find that I have tweaked my blog categories a bit. My top priorities for reading are ‘friends,’ ‘online community,’ and ‘writers.’ These tend to be people I either know in person, or who interact with me on my blog, or whose blogs I comment on. It’s the community of blogging that interests me the most, not just blogging itself. Aside from the ‘rockstars’ and the ‘resource sites,’ I have deleted about everything else, and continue to evaluate what is left.

And I’m not the only one. Fellow BlogHer, Amy Gahran, feels the same. In her post, “Why I ditched Most of My Feeds…” she describes her need to simply. She writes, “Bearing that in mind, this weekend I ditched all my general topic folders from my feed list — about 80% of my subscriptions. But now, since my feeds are more focused on exceedingly timely and personally relevant sources, I think they’ll help me participate in online conversations — public and private.”

I, too, find that in this world of over-information, I only have so much time. I’m not going to stress out because Dooce has written 200 posts that I have not read. I don’t know Dooce. She doesn’t know me. I find more value in the blending of offline and online community.

2 thoughts on “The Blog Diet”

  1. Of course, I couldn’t read all the way through this post without checking to see if I was still in.

    Otherwise, I’d have to go back and re-design my masthead. 😉

    I like this post….there’s an element of the blogosphere that is definitely schoolyard. Links get traded with all the fever of my second grader exchanging game cards. I’m trying to stay out of it. I decided recently that I want my blogrolls to reflect what I honestly read. With the caveat that that often changes faster than I can get around to updating my template.

    The reciprocal links are the hardest. Sometimes I am linked somewhere and I am thrilled and honored, but that site just isn’t a regular read for me, for reasons that don’t usually have anything to do with quality or affection. I feel guilty for not linking back to them, but I don’t want to start linking just to “be nice” either.

    I like the delicious linkroll b/c it changes with me. It’s a pretty fluid thing. I would hate for anyone to get their feelings hurt if they dropped off it. I mean there are always new and wonderful blogs out there, and only so much time to read them.

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