So I’m back into serious catch up mode with no sign of actually catching up in sight. I absolutely wanted to frame David Weinberger’s “No, I’m Not Keeping Up With Your Blog” post because it’s just rings so true for me (and a lot of other folks as well, it seems.)
But we’re now well past the point where any of us can keep up with all the blogs worth reading from the people worth keeping up with. Even with an aggregator.
I just can’t do it any more.
I’ve been faking it for a while. Months. Maybe a year. If we’ve met and I look confused about something you told me, and if you said, “I blogged it,” as if that should be explanation enough, I’ve made some excuse as if I read every one of your posts except that one.
The truth is, I probably haven’t read your blog in weeks. Months maybe.
And I don’t expect you to have read mine. I don’t want to lie any more. I don’t want to feel guilty any more. So let me tell you flat out: There are too many blogs I like and too many people I like to making “keeping up” a reasonable expectation, any more than you should expect me to keep up with Pokemon characters or I should expect you to keep up with Bollywood movies. I’m not going to feel guilty any longer about my failure.
Last week, I got behind because of school meetings and driving back and forth to NECC and working on the book and trying to parent two kids and my wife got sick and… But I realize this time, my sense of not knowing it all is never, ever going away until I, um, stop wanting to know it all, I guess.
I don’t know if I can do it.
In the last two days I’ve tried to wade through over 300 posts to my edblogger section in Bloglines. I’ve Jotted at least 15 links that I should write about in here at some point. There’s enough new and cool stuff that’s happened in the last week that would have filled up a month two years ago. And I can’t process it all right now, maybe never. This whole concept of the Read/Write Web is exploding (as I think this New York Times article which I haven’t completely read yet points out.)
So now what? My choices are to cut back on other things (my real job, wife, kids, etc.) and devote more time to keeping up, or to pull a Weinberger and just let go. Tough choice…
Or maybe it’s time to stop reading blogs altogether and just read my del.icio.us and Furl feeds. Follow what people are tagging about education, classroom, blogs, wikis…Internet addictions. Or maybe just certain people’s Jots feeds.
And forget about reading, I just gotta stop writing. Yep, no more blogging for me. I must write a couple of thousand of words a day for consumption by someone, somewhere. My consumption is more important, right? RIGHT? RIGHT?!?
Oy…I should be reading.
Happy 4th…
And Weinberger never brought up Podcasts which add a whole new dimension to keeping up. At least I can scan through my aggregator and read a few posting while doing other things (like pretending to pay attention to what’s going on at this meeting :-). It’s difficult to actually listen to a Podcast and get anything else done.