Sunday, March 06, 2011

Catching up on the blogs: when fewer posts help

I've been away from the blogs for the last week or so because of a very heavy workload and I've enjoyed catching up here and there over the last couple of days.  Catching up on the backlog provides a different way of consuming blogs than the every-day one.  One of the interesting features is that one ends up spending more time on blogs with fewer posts.  If you go several days without reading the big-posting blogs, the volume of unread posts grows so overwhelming that it is practically impossible to catch up with what you have missed.  If there are just a few select posts, on the other hand, you are that bit more likely to read them.  So what's the moral of the story?  Post less often? Read more regularly?  I don't think there is one.  Just observing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Mark,

AS people learn to use computers more, things will get even more sophisticated. People can run their RSS feed open items through a key word / phrase filter. Also, In addition to subscribing to specific blogs, people can subscribe to specific keywords. Someone might set their keywords to "Stromata", "Clement of Alexandra", and a few others, and the beauty of that is instead reading stuff from the same 40 people you subscribe to over and over, you are give posts by everyone that writes on the subjects you are interested in.

By starting to think of your interests, and saying "how can I find what I am interested in on that huge thing we call the internet?" and learning to use scripts that other people have written, you don't have to worry about how much other people write or add to the internet. You simply automate what your RSS presents you.

Cheers! RichGriese@gmail.com

Jon said...

I think Mark's looking at you, James McGrath.