Do You Read Too Many Blogs?
Ades of AdesBlog.com has a theory: that top bloggers don’t read other people’s blogs. To test his theory, he asked several big-name bloggers — Michael Arrington, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Yaro Starak — about their blog-reading habits. Except for Darren Rowse, they all said they read few or no blogs; Rowse said he subscribes to 700 but only skims the whole list occasionally — there are about 50 he looks at on a daily basis.
This is far from an exhaustive sample, but it’s got me wondering: how do you know when you’re reading too many blogs? I can’t imagine dropping blog-reading entirely — I get too much useful information, both for my professional life and my personal life, to consider blog-reading a total waste of time. On the other hand, though, do I read too many (I’m subscribed to 295)? Should I be more selective than I already am — or should I have a better system for processing the ones I do read?
Pros and Cons of Blog Reading
There are lots of good reasons to read blogs, including:
- Inspiration: Reading blogs gives me ideas that I can use or build on in my own work.
- Keeping up with current events: Since local news is useless, and cable news only slightly less so, blogs are often where I learn about the most important news of the day. I also learn of important news that the regular news outlets aren’t even covering (or are covering badly).
- The pulse of the times: As someone with a professional interest (as both an anthropologist and a writer) in how people and society act, reading blogs offers me insight into the way people see and react to the world around them.
- Things I wouldn’t think to ask: While I am an adept Googler when I need answers to some pressing question, a lot of time I’ve learned things from blogs I wouldn’t have Googled because I didn’t even know I didn’t know them. For example, I learned this year that I can deduct mileage between my home office and my classrooms, since I don’t have an office on campus.
- Entertainment: I find reading a strong writer’s thoughts on the topic of their expertise a far more entertaining prospect than watching 22 minutes of sit-com pablum (with 8 more minutes of commercial nonsense).
Are those pros balanced by the cons, though? The negative side of blog-reading includes:
- The echo-chamber effect: I read blogs that, for one reason or another, I like, which means it’s possible that I’m hearing viewpoints and opinions that resonate well with my own to the exclusion of others. To be honest, I don’t think this is a big problem, since blogs aren’t the only medium through which I engage with the world, but it’s something to think about.
- Time consumption: I’m not really sure how much time I spend reading blogs every day. An hour in the morning and again in the evening seems about right for most days. I that time that could be better used for other things?
- A sense of urgency: I sometimes feel pressure to go through more posts, because even a day or two of scant reading leaves my Google Reader inbox at “1000+”. A thousand of anything seems like a lot of work to do — am I setting myself up with a great deal of unnecessary stress and anxiety?
- The other echo-chamber effect: There’s only so much news in any niche, so when something noteworthy happens, chances are several sites will end up running the same story with only slight differences. I can either spend time reading each story to make sure I don’t miss any subtle detail, or skip them (which also takes time, and may mean I miss some key detail).
- Headlines that don’t pay off: You can process a lot of RSS feeds in very little time if you just look at headlines and delete anything that doesn’t look promising. There are two problems with this:
- Lots of bloggers are better headline writers than they are post writers. They know “10 Ways to Be Sexier” will attract readers, but only know 3 good ways to be sexier.
- Lots of other bloggers are better post writers than headline writers. Their incredibly insightful posts are given useless headlines like “I hadn’t thought of it like that…” and “Another Story I Like”.
Developing a Blog Reading System
One way to deal with some of these blog-reading downsides would be to change how I organize my RSS feeds. Currently, they’re organized by topic — I have a set of feeds for “productivity”, another on “writing”, a third on “education”, and so on.There are a few topics I try to read at least partially every day, and some I only read when I get around to it. But maybe I should adopt a system I’ve seen some others use, categorizing by priority?
Like this:
- Daily reads: Top authorities in their niche; the top 10 or so blogs worth looking at every day.
- Weekly reads: Strong blogs that post less frequently or post stuff I really want to spend some time on, so I could review them on my day off and not worry about rushing through them.
- Occasional reads: Blogs on topics I enjoy reading about but which aren’t essential to my day-to-day life. To read whenever I have free time.
- Probation: For new subscribes while I figure out a) whether I really want to give them my attention, and b) how high a priority I should make them.
I’m not especially thrilled at the prospect of re-tagging all my feeds in Google Reader, but maybe that’s what it takes to make sure that I’m not wasting my time on unessential reading when I could be doing something more important.
What about you?
I’d be interested in knowing how other people handle their blog-reading. Are Arrington and the others mentioned above anomalies? Do you read a lot of blogs? How many? Do you have a system for limiting the time you spend reading blogs? Do you not have one and feel like you do? And while we’re on the topic, what blogs do you consider “essential reading”?
WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY
Dustin Wax
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He can be reached though his freelancing site at DustinWax.comDon't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
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Comments
Thursday Bram says on April 21st, 2008 at 10:06 am
I’m subscribed to a ton of feeds — but most of them are in a file labeled “Catch Up.” That’s for those very slow days when I don’t have anything to do, or I desperately need inspiration.
Joel Falconer says on April 21st, 2008 at 10:11 am
I’m subscribed to many, but read few. On a slow day I used to open NetNewsWire and skim through, though slow days seem to no longer exist and I’ll open it just to mark them all as unread. There are 2-3 blogs I’m interested in checking on every day (more like every few days, since getting to the computer to just read a blog or two can be hard).
That said, I wouldn’t ever read Arrington, and I don’t know why people subscribe to and/or read his dribble and keep the moron in business.
Abhijeet from Jeet Blog says on April 21st, 2008 at 10:55 am
I am currently subscribed to more than 200 blogs and mostly scan through them and only read the topic which I find interesting. I don’t know ifd thats too many :)
Farfield says on April 21st, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I was subscribed to a lot of feeds, but I discovered that I definitely wasn’t reading all of them. So at one point I just deleted all of the feeds I hadn’t read for some time.
Now, when I find a new blog that seems interesting I try it out, subscribe, but again after a week or so when I discover I don’t read any of the articles I delete it from my reader.
I didn’t really think of having separate cathegories, that might be a good solution (only reading a few every day and a bunch of other less important or interesting ones only once a week).
Vered - MomGrind says on April 21st, 2008 at 12:50 pm
The blog world seems to me like a world where everyone talks, but no one listens.
So I am not surprised.
Dot says on April 21st, 2008 at 1:07 pm
@Vered – I agree. There’s not much of a conversation going on, except sometimes among those who comment.
@Dustin – I don’t subscribe. I’d rather visit the website and get the full content and links. I visit four roughly daily: Lifehack, Zen Habits and two on polymer clay art.
You mention “reading a strong writer’s thoughts on the topic of their expertise.” I wish I could find more of those. Perhaps you could list some for us?
Bob Russell says on April 21st, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I started out reading a lot of RSS blog feeds categorized by topic. Then I discovered that it was much more important to categorize by which ones I wanted to read in a given session.
Something like the following has worked best for me:
* “Must Read” — These are the blogs that I won’t miss even on the busiest days. I leave out some of the best blogs here, just because I don’t want feeds with too many entries. On a day with no time to read, I want to get the key info and get it quickly. If you have more than 50 (or 100 if you are a devoted blog reader) new items a day in this category, it’s too big. Shouldn’t take more than 5 or 10 or 15 mins to get through it.
* “Daily Read” — These are the ones that you would really feel bad about not covering during any given day. They are either very important to you, or they are bulk feeds that you “really” have to scan every day.
* “Bulk Read” — This includes the blogs with lots and lots of entries. (Think Digg or Slashdot or newpaper feeds.) Pick the ones you really enjoy, but that you can live without reading every day.
* “Sports” — This can be any topic like “Politics” or “Newpaper News” etc, but should be a very broad topic that you want to keep up on, and you don’t mind if you skip days here and there.
* “Bonus Items” — More blogs with interesting material, but you only read these (or pick a few items from them) when you have a spare moment to browse additional material.
* Candidates — New blogs that you haven’t categorized, but might be worth keeping. Might even be “Must Read”. It’s a way to check it out without cluttering your categories.
Note: It’s very important that you determine which blogs are really the key items, and not to include blogs with heavy post numbers unless you really have to at least scan them every day.
Once you are comfortable with only reading “Must Read” and “Daily Read” items, it takes a lot of the pressure off to read more. It can feel liberating to mark everything read even if you only read the 2 key categories.
If you notice something isn’t necessary or you really miss seeing another blog, you can switch things around. Once you have made that cutoff, it becomes obvious if you make a mistake and it’s easy to recategorize a blog.
It’s just one approach, but it works really well for me, and turned RSS feeds from a chore to a pleasure.
Travis says on April 21st, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I read a few dozen blogs regularly, and scan about 70 more. I think it makes perfect sense that the big-time pro-bloggers would spend less time reading other blogs. As a starting blogger myself I read other blogs to get more feel for the medium, experience different styles while developing my own, and to keep in touch with the pulse of the communities formed around my interests. Big time bloggers have been through that, have developed their own strong style, and have less need to experiment and be exposed to other approaches.
When I get all rich and famous I’ll probably still read other blogs though. I really like the medium. ;-)
jtimberman says on April 21st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
I only subscribe to feeds that I will use. If I add something and end up just skipping over it, I remove that from my list. I don’t have a lot of actual blogs, maybe a dozen, because while many bloggers have a moment where they share wisdom, most of the so called content isn’t really worth reading.
For what its worth, lifehack.org is highly useful and I thank the authors here for particularly excellent content.
jtimberman says on April 21st, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Oh, and I’d like to mention that I’ve never heard of the blog authors mentioned in this post. Sounds like they have too much free time to add blogs to their reader.
Meryn Stol says on April 21st, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I like the idea of organizing blogs by priority. Maybe I’ll try that one out, once I’ve got through all my subscriptions. ;)
Brad says on April 21st, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I go through a good number of blogs on a bi-daily basis. Although I haven’t used the tag system and setup separate categories, there are blogs that I “daily read” and “occasionally read”. Blogs that I find most interesting are those that are directly related to the topic I am interested in, virtual worlds, and have been leading the industry through its early stages.
Brandon says on April 21st, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Does the fact that I am reading a blog about reading too many blogs mean something???
Brian says on April 21st, 2008 at 6:44 pm
I used to avidly read way too many, and while it was an amazing source of inspiration and it is also a fantastic way to use up a ton of time. I still have a bazillion aggregated in Google Reader, but I mostly skim. I really wish I had the time to sit and read them all.
Maria Palma says on April 21st, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I’ve subscribed to many blogs, but I simply scan the headlines until I come across something that catches my eye. When I first started blogging I used to read way too much, but that’s because I was still learning about how to blog and getting a feel of what everyone else was talking about.
I also used to get stressed out when I didn’t read every feed, but I’m over that. When you go into a bookstore, you don’t read every magazine you like, right? It’s the same with the blogosphere.
MrAchievement - Stanley Bronstein says on April 21st, 2008 at 7:43 pm
The problem is not if we read too many blogs, its whether or not we are reading quality blogs.
The trick is to subscribe to a bunch and scan them quickly. If you consistently see a blog is below your standards, POOF, delete it from your reader and move on.
IF you are reading the right blogs, you will be learning something and thus your time will have been well spent.
That’s why I always try to write clear, concise blog articles, like your’s above. I figure if my readers are going to take their time to come to my site, I owe them to have quality content. Based upon the quality of the content on your website, you obviously agree.
Just my 2¢
Mr Achievement
Stanley F. Bronstein
Attorney, CPA, Author, Blogger & Professional Motivational Speaker
Steve Bannister says on April 21st, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Hi Dustin,
I only have about 50 blogs on my reader right now (just started blogging recently) so it doesn’t take long to zip through them.
I really like your idea of prioritizing some blogs for daily and weekly reads.
I haven’t yet felt the downside of reading blogs because of the low number in my reader and the steeper learning curve I still have with blogging.
After reading your post I think I’ll be very picky on deciding which blogs I want to keep adding to my reader in order to keep things down to a managable size.
Thanks for the post!
Cheers,
Steve
sikantis says on April 21st, 2008 at 11:42 pm
I read about 20 blogs per day but I want to read more. I need more time, just now I’m writing for my blogs. I liked to read your first point “inspiration”, this is what I want to achieve with my blogs. I’d like to get more feedback and comments to know if I do it right.
Provi says on April 22nd, 2008 at 3:22 am
Hmm….I guess skimming them is what I do. I use IE 7 and in my Fav’s menu, I have a folder called “Keepers” which just has links to my fav blogs which usually contain either useful or fun information and I just check them out a couple of days of the wekk or depending on how I prioritize them, once a day.
For me, it all goes and subject and how much of the persons stuff I like on average to determine how often I read them.
elysa says on April 22nd, 2008 at 3:48 am
I have a folder called Favorites that I read every day and the rest of my feeds are broken down by topic.
I read my topics by days of the week actually. So I guess that means they are also only weekly reads. I do the days of the week reading for 2 reasons – I like to learn similar material at the same time it makes it easier for me to remember and secondly I read the topic based on what I’m writing about on my blog the next day to give me inspiration.
For example, Mondays I usually blog about Money so Sunday night or Monday morning I read my finances folder.
Claude says on April 22nd, 2008 at 7:24 am
I too keep links to some blogs I like and visit them every now and then to scroll through the posts of the past few days or weeks. This works perfectly for the kind of blogs I like, like Lifehack or LifeDev. I am not subscribed to any blog at all, gives me too much stress to see all the bold face unread headlines. After all, however, I am not a huge fan of weblogs anyways because most bloggers seem to have an attitude I just dislike. Too much navel-gazing and just too much of the same all the time. So, um, I guess I prefer subscribing to newspapers and magazines instead.
Jeff Hess says on April 22nd, 2008 at 9:09 am
Shalom Dustin,
My first rule is no feeds. To me feeds are like junk mail. I tried them for about a week and swore never again.
From the beginning I have been draconian with my blogroll, restricting the number of blogs and allotting those I do read to one of three categories: daily, weekly and occasional.
If a blog is on my blogroll, I actually do read every post the blogger writes. If I find myself skimming, the blog gets demoted and eventually removed.
B’shalom,
Jeff
Fubiz says on April 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
Interesting article.
siddiq says on April 22nd, 2008 at 10:46 am
most of the blog in the world nonsence and useless, there are 100 million blogs in the world, they just started and abandoned. lot of people in the world doesn’t have good communication skills.essential reading blog http://www.uspaper.blogspot.com/
Hazel Edmunds says on April 22nd, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Yes is the short answer to your opening question BUT … lot’s of them are essential for my work i.e. they are newsletters or press releases from government, journal contents and so on that just happen to come into my reader because they’re RSS not email.
I prefer the control that this gives me. I loosely categorise between essential for work, might be inspirational for work, personal development and personal stuff.
If I get pushed it’s the personal stuff that gets marked as read when I haven’t even skimmed it (except 3 Quarks Daily and Arts & Letters Daily). I could, however, do with getting rid of some of the technical stuff — there’s a lot of repetition in there. I’ll go do it now (or maybe I’ll leave it till tomorrow).
Hazel Edmunds says on April 22nd, 2008 at 5:43 pm
And I didn’t even see the unnecessary apostrophe until after I’d posted — sorry.
Brian says on April 23rd, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Interesting idea about tagging blogs to help prioritize reading. My daily list just got a lot shorter and about half my list is now on probation.
Mike says on April 23rd, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I kind of suspect that maybe one of the reasons for this is that top bloggers are very selective about what they read… they know what quality is and don’t want to waste time reading something that isn’t it.
foo says on April 24th, 2008 at 8:05 am
To speak for myself, I had too many blogs in the past. It have been around 100, but just 20 or so with more or less high frequency. I took me around 2h a day. Now I don’t read blogs on a daily basis.
First i started to get all blogs in just one folder and filtering them by the subject (like in the past, but having all in one folder makes it much quicker).
After that I looked once in a while trough the deleted blog entrys (i taged them like “[lifhack.org] Articleheadline”) and could throw out a couple of unintersting blogs, which reduced the amounght. Another way I was going once in a while was reading a blog with the browser and checking the first 1-3 pages to see if this blog is still interesting for me.
After a while I came to the most important point: is the content really that important for me? Sure, some things are interesting, but would it be a big loss if I won’t read it? Most times the answer was no, so I reduced more.
After repeating this ways once in a while I just had a couple of blogs left over.
I realized that it takes too much time to read all the few interesting blogs on a daily (rss) basis. So I used a own developed system to check blogs by browsers just every few days to every few weeks (depending on the frequency of these blogs). This saved me a lot of time.
Another progress out of the question “how can i reduce the time to read all the interesting blogs” is to bookmark now every potential interesting article if I check a blog once in a while. After a while I check this bookmarked list and find these topics less interesting as in the past: it halfed the number of interesting articles.
Beside that I read between 30 and 90min a day usual daily news (newsletter is faster as going to the webpage a few times a day) and the newssources of pages I need for business to stay up to date.
Today I cant understand why I did and the past, and still so much people waste their time with so much blogs. If I just look over the last month I was reading a dozen of GTD blogs if figured that most stuff became more and more bullshit in my eyes, half of it with possible indirect advertising. And the most stuff repeats randomly and on different GTD blogs.
What GTD blogs teached me: most GTD blogs result in an anti-GTD-behaviour and you really need to learn how to pick out only the good stuff. But close to no GTD blog admin will ever tell you this, because they dont want to lose their readers as subscribers.
(That I write this on this blogs shows that I like lifehack.org, else I would have kicked it out of the interesting blog list and havent read this article:)
Aeman says on March 18th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Hi,
I am just a novice in this blogging stuff,
You all are going to agree that Reading Blogs is somehow related to the interests we all have…whether it be personal, business or else, we get to stick with blogs upon our obsessions. Even if we don’t have time to read blogs, we will make up for those curious to us.
Gtown says on July 27th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
This is one I just found but i think so far seems like it could be an uplifting blog. Not too into blogging yet…anyone else have a good suggestion?