I love the whole concept of using Google Reader to custom tailor my news, but it has just gotten to be too much. I found what I really looked forward to was new blog postings from my friends, and I would scroll through the blogs on the side looking for their updates first. I have no time to read all the entries; it was over 500 this morning. So I have clipped most of the pro blogs, like BoingBoing, Wired, Slashdot, Tor and so on, not because I don’t like them, but just because I can’t keep up.
io9, Massively and ArsTechnica are, I think, the only pro blogs left on my feed. And io9 is tentative, based on the number of NSFW articles they run.
Twitter isn’t so bad, but I have found myself following celebrities for no real reason other than everyone else was. I’ll never have a dialog with these people, and certainly there is nothing about my life that could interest them, so sorry, Felicia Day, Brent Spiner and other people of that ilk — I love your work, but do we really have anything to say to each other?
Lastly, Facebook is gone. I’ve been thinking for awhile now that all these weird little tests you’re supposed to take all the time is just free marketing data for someone. I mostly stopped filling out those tests a long time ago. I’d log in a couple of times and there were dozens more tests I had to take! Just deactivating it just now, there were lots more tests I had to take, most of which required installing applications for, and my mailbox had several more invitations to I dunno what, take more tests probably.
Look, if you want to know how much you and I are alike, just ask me. But damn, Facebook made me feel like a test subject in a psych study.
Social media I use? LinkedIn. Why? Because though it has a bunch of cruft, the cruft/useful stuff ratio is really low. Most everyone I have ever worked with is on there, so I can get an overview for what people are doing with their lives when I would like to know, and if I want to know more, I can get in touch.
And I still use Twitter. As a way to have conversations with people who share similar interests but aren’t necessarily in the same online social groups, it’s invaluable. I am always meeting new people there that I can just — talk to. Chat. In short messages. I wrote my first Twitter application for the Nerd Millennium last week, and it felt good and I had fun doing it. I loved live-tweeting the presidential debates last fall. It’s like IRC without having to choose a room. So that’s a win.
But for reading pro blogs, I feel it’s better to just go to their site and surf it like normal. Having every story pushed to my feed gave them a sense of urgency they haven’t earned. I want to check the feed, read an article or two while collecting my thoughts for whatever it is I’m doing, and then I’m gone. Having dozens of articles a day from the biggies was making me overwhelmed. If you sent only a couple of stories a day to my feed, the good stories, you’d still be there.
The pro blogs that are left also spam my feed, but for them, I read almost everything they publish. Massively is likely to go soon, not because I don’t like their articles, but just because I can’t read the site at work and all the content is hidden behind links I can’t follow, at work. I can surf the site at home. They stay for now because sometimes I can get a decent feel for what they wanted to say in the intro paragraph, or figure out what site the news item came from originally and just read it there.
8 thoughts on “Feeding less, Twittering more (or less).”
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I remember going to Massively, Ten Ton every day…yet, it got out of control, that I spent more time reading and less working.
Personally I would prefer to read what people are doing and what their lives are like (in game and out), moreso than have news blared at me all the time.
Cheers and good move
I allways went to the “Pro Blogs” to find the up to date news about what ever game it was that I was playing, And I never felt the need to go read some one’s blog. Like what the hell could some one tell me that a pro site could not. Then one day I started playing around with the idea of doing a podcast. I started looking around and found that all most all the people that did podcast allso bloged. So I felt that if I was to ever to become a podcaster I would need to learn to blog. Being stupid I thought that if I read othere people’s blogs I could learn from them how to blog. What I found was that a lot of them was talking about things that at the time seemed stupid to me and had nothing to do with games. Then as I was still reading blogs I found that I was learning, not how to blog, but that blogers seem to scop the pro sites on the news for what ever game they was talking about. some times by hours, or even days.
Now I have just a few blogs I check every day, and most time I only hit the pro site on my weekends.
Oh by the way, you have a very nice blog here. I’ve been checking it out for the last few days. (Found you by Virginworlds[dot]com)
Sorry for taking so much space to say very little.
Alik Steel
I used to do the same too and end up feeling like a slave to Google Reader. I still have a whole ton of sites I subscribe to but I only ever read a few of them. I’ll come home each week and see 1000+ unread feeds, read a few that I’m interested in (this one included ;-)) and mark everything else as read.
Heh… I am feeling so free with my feed reader now. I like to read pretty much everything, and it’s just about 30 or so a day.
So easy to get overloaded with useless information these days.
The plus side of information overload is that it gets you extra points in random trivia games.
good point. subscribing to a hundred new RSS fees right away 😉
You could always put the “pro” blogs into a separate tag that you only glance through. Same goes for facebook and other social sites too.
I never really used FB enough to know how to do things like that. I got a test from my sister where I was supposed to make a new note (?) and then forward it to everyone on my contact list (how?). That in fact was the time I realized that (a) it was unfair of tests to make me go through all that work to (b) spam everyone unlucky enough to friend me, and that (c) I wasn’t really enjoying a service that, as far as I could tell, had as its purpose gathering marketing data from me and making me the unwilling recipient of chain letters. Can’t say I ever had fun using it.
As far as pro blogs go, well, I still subscribe to the ones I actually enjoy. I don’t even miss the others. Being able to read everything in my feed in ten minutes is a blessing I now appreciate.
But — I at least had a connection with old friends on FB, if tenuous. Maybe, if I can figure out how to turn off receiving any more tests or chain letters or ‘notes’ or application requests or anything besides the one thing I would like to do — see the status of friends — I’d give it another shot. But that is just what Twitter is for!