” I stopped reading blogs daily”
In a time far far away in the past I used to devour a lot of blogs madly, just about every blog that I find minutely interesting I would read it and in many of the blogs I used to dig up all the archives. But over a period of time of through this habit of blog devouring I realized few things and as a consequence have stopped reading blogs for sometime but that does’nt seem to leave me in an exhalted situation
One of the primary realizations is that in this blog explosion(aka information source explosion), a lot of what is spelt is noise. The SNR of blogosphere is pretty low.
No doubt there are newer & newer aggregator that are coming up which are using advanced techniques like machine learning to understand the preferences of a consumer and then suggesting/re-indexing posts accordingly. But they are not doing good enough work in helping me spend the scarce/little amount of attention/time that I have to spend. We need better tool to capture to arrange & manage this so called flow of information(or should information be really managed). All the blog indexers that exist today have’nt really found a good way to calculate the relevance of a blog. And so far they have’nt found a better way to find me a blog which will match anyone’s preference a lot.
When I stopped reading blogs I started missing all the potential cool stuff/info that I get to know via blogs.
Now these blogs have become something you can’t live with and also you can’t live without . So I came up with following approach. I read blogs only on one day (say saturday) in a week and read a very few selected blogs (I have restricted that number) which match my preference best. In all the blogs that I read I am not just interested in the post but the conversation that ensues. If I am reading a blog on saturday then I try to read blogs till the last thursday thus leaving a two days gap, sufficient time for others to comment. If the post was really a noise (I have filtered the low SNR one’s already) the commentors really make sure that it gets checked. [ Another realization I have had is that even the best of blogger spout noise sometimes, it is rare though].
There are perceptible drawbacks of this approach.
1) You don’t get the latest & greatest news (For ex: you can’t get alpha/beta invites :)) !!
If you really look at it then it is not a great disadvantage , as I said most of what is said is noise and you put a lot of cognitive load on your self to remove the shaff and get what is of interest to you. If something is a real good information that I should know then it would eventually reach me. Well experienced traders will tell you that rise and fall that one sees in sensex/index on a daily basis is basically noise disguised as information 🙂
2) Novely gets killed because your blogroll is static.
Now this is a problem but I hve not been able to find a good solution to and am looking a solution for it.
This is a post which has been in the draft state since last few weeks which I could find time to publish only now.
Good idea. My new motto is “blog less, slog more”. 🙂
🙂 Good motto !! Should put that as a background on the desktop 🙂
Now, this is a post of a mature blogger (very very early adopter) or someone who has been in the observing the blogosphere for sometime!
I agree – I face similar problems and I am phasing out a solution which I am going to share on my wordpress blog soon. Just thought willl comment saying “its nice honest and original post.
I have come up to believe this, soon we will start paying money to have specialized rss feeds just to ‘save time’. Will be like channels and will mostly be “human” channels. On the lines of directors of a film? what do ya say?
Afterall, time is money and saving time = giving money?
Thanks for your comment vinu. I get reminded of a quote by Herbert Simon made long ago which is gained a lot of relevance in today’s world.
“When Information becomes abundant , what is scarce is attention”.
We need better attention management mechanism(tools) & techniques. And yes there will be a market(a big one) for such tools & techniques.
Rajan