Socratic Monologue
cc licensed flickr photo shared by twicepix
Time for some winter cleaning. There are a lot of people who prefer to do spring cleaning, but once spring hits I’d rather be outside. I like this time of year so that it clears out the space I’m going to be in for the next few months. If I don’t need it or use it, it is in danger of being evicted.
I’m looking at the same thing for the RSS feeds in my Google Reader. The current count of unread items is well into the 4 digit range. Some of them are unread news sources and some are unread blog posts. I’m going to clean out the news sources by the standard mark all as read technique but for the blogs I’m going to be more heavy handed. They are all going to be cleared and unsubscribed. I’m not sure yet which ones I’ll resubscribe to or if I’ll bother to resubscribe to any at all.
There was a time when we in the educational technology used our blogs not only to throw our mental spaghetti at the world to see what stuck, but also to stay in touch with each other. It wasn’t just our ideas we put out there, it was also how we stayed in touch by commenting on each others posts and responding via blog posts. RSS was the conduit for finding out what others were saying or thinking. Bloglines, then later Google Reader, became the community gathering place.
Twitter makes a lot of that unnecessary. We can find out what others are saying and thinking in real time. All the small talk that is the social glue holding a community together happens on Twitter. I wouldn’t use a blog post anymore to thank Rick for bringing me back a Cubs baseball from Chicago, I’d use a tweet. Twitter hasn’t replaced blogging, but it has replaced some of what a blog used to be used for because it is a better tool for doing that. Twitter has had the same effect on my blog post reading as well – I usually read posts that I’ve found via Twitter instead of on Google Reader. Maybe I only need Google Reader to keep up with various news sources (although many of those are also broadcasting links on Twitter).
OK – here goes.
Whew – that was easy. In case you felt a disturbance in the force, I might have just unsubscribed from your blog feed. But don’t feel like I’m rejecting you. It’s not you … it’s me. I haven’t given you nearly the time and attention you deserve. I hope that we can still stay in touch and be twitter friends.
Levity aside, I have three questions for you and your comments here or on twitter are truly appreciated. First, did you find out about this blog post from an RSS feed reader or from Twitter? Second, are you finding most of your reading online via twitter or an RSS feed? Third, if I do decide to start subscribing to some blog posts again, who are your “must read” bloggers?
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I was exactly where you are a few weeks ago…a firehose of content flooding my Greader account. But I had a sober second thought when I realized that I actually would lose an important part of my workflow – the ability to search the collective wisdom of a trusted network.
I mean, I subscribe to a lot of people in EdTech. I can’t possible read everything they post, and only manage to comment and connect with a few on a regualr basis. But by having their feeds in GReader, I can use the search feature when I am stumped, or want to find information about how my particular network solved a problem. It’s like having a custom Google search engine that searches only sites and sources I trust.
So, instead what I have done is created folders that contain my must reads, and folders that contain everyone else. Now, I only worry about reading the top reads (which tend to be the people I have a fairly strong connection to) and let the rest float. To go along with this is a switch in behaviour to begin to use GReaders search functionality, and start my searches for edtech related stuff there instead of a generic Google search.
I hadn’t considered the searchability of Google Reader when I was blasting away all the blogs I was subscribing to. I like the way you separate your must reads from all the other feeds, but I usually find my “must read” articles/posts through links found in Twitter. I think that I get more links to useful information through twitter now than through my RSS subscriptions. It seems that people use their blogs for small essays and well developed thoughts but the conversation is happening in Twitter, including the “here’s an interesting link that I found” types of posts that used be on people’s blogs. When I do find an interesting link, I add it to my Instapaper list and/or bookmark it Delicious, which has become my “research team” in place of the RSS subscriptions.
Thanks for the suggestion for how to organize feeds. If/when I start subscribing again, I think I’ll give your idea a try.