Well, except me. I’ve spent some time today working at my new hobby — blogline subscriber surfing. This is the practice of clicking on the subscriber list in bloglines and checking out what people are subscribed to. Say I was interested in who was also subscribed to The Accidental Hedonist’s RSS feed and wanted to see what those folks were reading. I’d select the subscriber list and see who had public listings. Out of the twelve people subscribed to that blog, five, including myself, have public listings. I’ve found some fantastic food sites this way, more than I’ll be able to read. It’s a problem.
Bloglines does suggest sites based on my subscriptions, but they’re disproportionately a-list blogs and mainstream stuff. I’m more interested in building an eclectic mix of feeds. I can’t read the same thing that everyone else is. How gauche! And repetitive. Stories tend to circulate around the same blogsets…the lovefest of cross-linking and citations can get boring.
I could subscribe to both the a-listers and the oddball blogs, but my list of feeds is creeping towards 150. I can’t absorb that much content per day. I think the real trick to being a successfully informed individual will be building the right mix of feeds. I’m constantly refining what I read, but I can’t outline the rules about how to mix feeds. All I can say is it feels more like art than science right now…sorry, this isn’t well thought out. I’ll continue to mull it over during Christmas and report back.
Have a merry holiday everyone!!!
