How I Read Blogs

I often hear people say, “I can’t keep up with all the blogs.” Well, you don’t have to. I’m surprised that so few people use RSS readers even though they have been around for a long time. Without some type of aggregator, it is not practical to keep up with all the blogs you are interested in. Who could remember to revisit more than a dozen blogs on a regular basis? Even if you do revisit them, it does not mean that they have something new for you to read. Your friend’s personal blog may not update that often, but whenever it does, you might want to read it. How can you be sure that you read it when he posts something every month or so? The answer is RSS reader.

When you visit a blog, you should be able to see a little RSS icon somewhere on the page or in the address bar. If you click on it, it should prompt you to choose your RSS reader. I use Google Reader because it allows me to see all the blog entries within a Web page. I don’t need to install any special application. It also works well with my iPhone. (When you visit Google Reader on iPhone Safari, you get the mobile version of the site.)

Once you have RSS reader configured, this is the only place you need to visit on a regular basis. All the new blog posts will come streaming into it. Add your friend’s blog to it, you will see it as soon as he posts something, even if he posts only once a year.

I add to my RSS reader liberally. If any blog looks remotely interesting, I add it. Right now, I have 128 blogs in my reader. Most of them do not update so often, so my main window is usually filled with entries from popular blogs. The list only displays the name of the blog, the headline, and the date/time, so I can scan very quickly, and I only click on items that sound interesting. Even if I don’t read any of them, just by scanning through the titles, I can get an idea of what’s going on in the world.

Every now and then, I review the list of blogs. If I see blogs with a hundred unread posts, it’s a good indication that I wouldn’t read any of their future posts either, so I remove them.

Google Reader allows me to create categories. I have categories like “Economy”, “Friends”, and “Technology”. If I’m interested in what’s going on in the economy, I click on that category to see only the blogs related to economy.

I rely on my bloggers to deliver news to me, so I rarely use news websites as a way to get a sense of what’s going on. Most news websites allow you to customize your view based on news topic (e.g. politics, finance, health, entertainment, etc..), but that is not particularly a good way to filter news items. For instance, I’m not a sports fan, so I generally ignore news about sports, but every now and then there are news events in sports that grab my attention. For instance, some famous athelete might launch a Website that is interesting from a point of view of user-experience. Different people see different things in the same fact or event, but those differences are not easily categorizable or even identifiable. This is where bloggers come in handy; they function as intelligent information filters. They are your information brokers and advisors.

—posted by Dyske   » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page