Too much information overload
I’m having a bit of a blogging crisis.
Ok, fine, that was a little melodramatic. But I’m having a really hard time figuring out what I should be reading and when.
Kim mentioned all this the other day when she talked about her audience and blog fame and it got me thinking. My Google reader is out of control. When I find a new blog, I scoop it up and squirrel it away in a folder where it languishes. I’m suffering from social overload. Just look at my list of feeds.
I have Flickr contacts that may not match my Twitter contacts that may not match the folks in my RSS feed or those on Facebook. And don’t even get me started about LiveJournal. I can’t make heads or tales of any of it.
Should I just trash all these people I’ve collected? What if one of them is a gem and I’m missing out? Should I read all these hundred of personal blogs from people I hardly know? Or should I pare my list down to a dozen or so folks that I really love their writing?
There was a blog that I read in my giant “parenting” category. Some mommy blogger. Honestly, I got her confused with other mommy bloggers in that folder. I must have heard her blog name at a BlogHer once. And for the most part I skimmed her entries. Blah blah kid said cute thing blah blah daughter growing up so fast blah blah husband never does the dishes blah blah. But one entry stuck in my head as she talked about trying to explain right and wrong to her son and how this was much harder than she thought it would be. Rich and I still talk about this entry and she wrote it in November of 2008, before I was even pregnant with our first child. So this random woman who I could have forgotten all about affected me. It would be a shame to miss that.
But wow there’s just so much! It’s too much to read! I’m still missing out on stuff regardless of if I have the blogs in my feed reader. Ironically, I never told that mommy blogger that wrote such a great entry how much I like it. So I’m not living up to my part of the deal in this whole community thing either.
Are there people that you read online that you don’t have a personal relationship with? Do those people outnumber your friends? At what point do they become a friend versus some random person you’re reading about? Are you content to read about the lives of strangers or are they all pathways to meet people that you’d invite over for dinner if they were in town?
I should have it so hard that there is so much good writing out there for me to scoop up. I just need a way to better digest it all.
I wish I had good advice for you, but I guess I don’t. It is a combination of deciding it’s important enough to try to at least skim for things that interest you, and willingness to hit the “mark all as read” liberally when life is too much for it. I don’t unsubscribe much. Because even if I can’t read a particular blog this month, I might be able to next month.
I think it becomes personal when the comments are mutual, and only after time passes and that, I guess you’d call it trust, is built up.
Sometimes I wonder why I am reading the blogs of people I don’t have much in common with or who I disagree with, then I remind myself that it broadens and opens my mind to do that. I know that doesn’t help AT ALL. But my life is richer and I feel like I’m usually learning from reading stuff. Even if I skip it, mark it all as read one week, there will be something amazing next week.
That said sometimes if something is consistently irritating or boring… I have to unsub. Even skimming takes time.
Good Lord, that is out of control.
I go throuh sprees of collecting people, but if I find myself scrolling past their entries in google reader once too often, then I will purge them. I suppose it’s like cleaning out your wardrobe. If there is something you have lived just fine without wearing for a year, then it’s probably going to be OK to continue to live without it.
Generally I’m quite a thorough reader – so I prefer to follow fewer people more intensely, than to take on more than I can read without it starting to feel like a chore. When time opens up I will go ‘shopping’ for new blogs to read, but I stop when reading starts to feel more like a chore than a pleasure.
Good luck.
I read many blogs of people I don’t know at all, not having even ever exchanged comments with them. I, too, hang onto blogs longer than I should based on one or two posts that meant something to me… but at some point if I find myself always skimming or just instantly marking as read a particular blog, I remove it from my reader and figure that if they write another great post, it’ll find it’s way to me. There’s so much good writing out there, you can’t get it all (and, boy, is there so much bad writing lol).
“Are you content to read about the lives of strangers or are they all pathways to meet people that you’d invite over for dinner if they were in town?”
I guess that is a hard one to figure out, I have started reading a few strangers personal blogs and have not gone back to several but have a few who I would consider inviting for supper one day. You can get yourself overloaded pretty easy but the ones you actually read and have made connections with would be the ones to save.
Like I’m telling you something you didn’t know already :^)
My GoogleReader is stuck at 1000+ unread posts. I’m not even sure how many different blogs I have. Some of them have over 30 unread posts (this is a single blog.) And I added two new blogs yesterday.
If I’m honest, I regularly read about 10 blogs – regularly meaning I look for new posts and read them as soon as they go up. Most of those are people I actually know. I do also read a few from people I’ve never met and who never respond to my comments, but I love their writing.
I don’t know how to keep up with it all. There isn’t a way to keep up with it all. If you let your GoogleReader stay at 1000+ all the time it kind of takes away the pressure. If I figure I’ll never get under 1000, then I can just keep collecting.. . . .
I’ve also learned to accept the 1000+ atop my Google Reader. Although I still occasionally go directly into specific feeds or folders, my favorite method of dealing with RSS overload is this:
1. Click the All Items link
2. On the View Settings drop-down, select “Sort By Magic”
3. Magic ensues
I’m sure there’s some creepy Google algorithm working its mojo that would keep me up at night with its privacy implications if I thought too hard about it, but being able to dip into my feedstream whenever I feel like it takes a lot of the pressure/guilty/insanity out of the equation.
At some point I realized my life was ruled by TV. “I have this show on this night, and this show then, and…” my nights were planned around what I watched. I enjoyed the shows, they entertained or enlightened me in some way, plus there is the chance to talk with others about the shared experience. The DVR and Netflix freed me enough to realize that it doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did. Someday I’ll get to watch it if I don’t right now. And if I don’t ever watch it at all, it will be all right.
This is a crappy metaphor, but there you go. There is a lot of great stuff out there and you are going to miss some of it, and it’s okay. I use “Mark all as read” when it gets too much, and – as Kim noted above – maybe next week I’ll see something cool that will be a real find, like that one parenting post you mention.