Here’s an admission…I’m an RSS fraud. Hypocrite, if you must. And I apologize.
Yesterday, in three straight presentations about the wonders and potential of RSS to rock our eduworlds, I kept getting more and more embarrased at the fact that when I showed my Bloglines account, which has ballooned up to 197 feeds, it was obvious that while I might be subscribed, I’m not keeping up with my reading. In fact, if you totalled up the number of unread messages in my list, it’s a very audience appealing 3739. If that doesn’t motivate some people to dive right in, I don’t know what will.
Now understand that 2,347 of those are from Wes Freyer, the most prolific edublogger in the universe. (Really it’s “only” 57.) And the problem is that I hestitate to click the Wes link because I know it’s gonna take me at least an hour to read through all of the good stuff he’s blogging about. (Slow down, Wes. Please. I’m begging.)
This is why I had to quit my job…
Anyway, I made the people in attendance yesterday swear that they would take a time out if they ever got up to 20 feeds in their aggregators. Hopefully that will keep them from feeling like a total RSS failure if they should “get behind” in their reading.
I’m not sure that this isn’t related to your post yesterday about OneNote. I never flag, tag or notate anything in my aggregator in any way. I just let it drift by in my river of news and keep it in a tab for a few days if I want to get back to it. I use the search in my aggregator or Google if I need to find something older. And I never go to bed (if I’m online) without clearing the new items, one way or another.
Engadget and Google news fill mine up, I clear them out.
It is the effort that counts. We cannot be perfect. But when we sit down to read, I find that reading bloglines is more bang for my buck than even reading the Wall Street Journal or educators magazines. Worse case, I use the search feature and search through the blogs I’ve subscribed too.
I always have some must reads I try to hit every day. In fact, I think you’re one of them. Thank you for an excellent blog. I’m glad you’re not overly prolific!
This reminds me of a post I read from Doug Johnson several months ago on “blogorrhea.” It is a good discussion and issue. It is likely more important to post ideas of quality rather than strictly a large quantity. So I am thinking about this!
As I am currently in Orlando attending the SITE 2006 conference and a little of FETC, it is a time of a blog post surge for me, to be sure. One thing to note on this is that I am really not blogging just for other people. I would say at least 50% of the reason I am blogging is for personal / selfish reasons. I find that I refer back to my own blog all the time (using the WordPress search feature), because if I heard about something and blogged about, then I have a digital representation or archive of that thought I can refer back to later.
So, I do feel your pain Will! I have wondered if I am silly to keep adding RSS feeds to my own bloglines account, I went over 200 feeds awhile back. There is no way I have time to process all this content. Unfortunately, my email is somewhat similar, although I do try to keep up– but when I get behind it can be almost impossible to catch up at times….. I guess my advice is, don’t sweat it if you miss some posts! The conversation is non-linear and hyperlinked… I don’t think any of us can truly “keep up” with it all! 🙂