I Can Sympathize

It’s getting harder and harder this day to navigate through the noise, Michael Silence quotes another blog post:

What was once this great way to connect with others, has become this never ending loop of barely keeping my head above the social media water line. I’ve literally lost sleep over the fact that I haven’t ever visited some of the my most loyal commenters or that I didn’t answer a question left in my comments section or that I have at all times at least two or three need-to-be-answered emails. My close friends’ blogs, I hardly have time to read those and when I do, my comments often amount to “great post,” which is apparently the “wrong” way to comment.

I can sympathize with new media overload. I find Facebook, for instance, absolutely impossible to keep up with. I check in occasionally, but no doubt I’m missing a lot. Twitter I actually enjoy and find useful.  For activism, I think it’s far and away a superior tool over Facebook, and I’ll even say over blogs in many respects.

Back in the beginning days of my blogging career, I used to follow a prodigious number of blogs on a daily basis.  Now I read some here, some there, during the week.  The list of blogs I hit every day is less than ten now.  In terms of finding out what other blogs were talking about, it’s easier to just follow a few aggregators, and use their editorial sense to find out what’s going on.  The more you continue in blogging, the harder and harder it seems to get to keep up.

9 thoughts on “I Can Sympathize”

  1. You don’t use an RSS reader for blogs? I have over a hundred on my list, and I can zip through the news in minutes. I have my favorites, which I pay more attention to than others, but I can get a great idea what’s going on just by looking at headlines and intro paragraphs.

  2. I have a small handful I hit daily, and a longer list that I wander through over the course of a week.

    Mostly I surf from my sitemeter reference logs…

  3. I don’t use an RSS reader either, I just browse the ones I’ve met at GBR, and forget who and what I commented at last – no brain, no headache – it’s painless.

  4. Ditto Robb Allen. Though I have a fair amoutn of free time. I cna skim and slash my feeds via my handheld, though.

    Can’t keep up with Instapundit anymore though

  5. I do use an RSS feeder, but I find getting through over 70 blogs rough. Do I find myself always being caught up with about a dozen or so, and then catching up on the rest as I find time.

  6. Don’t use RSS or Twitter. I do a sweep of about 6 or 7 blogs first thing in the morning and check others as I get the chance.

    The main message board I frequent is Illinoiscarry.com

    After I paired away most of the nonsense, I’ve gotten some good use out of Facebook beyond just finding lots of old friends.

  7. That’s my RSS pattern in a nutshell; though I have a few more feeds. Admittedly, a large chunk of them are comics, so less with the thinky. My actual blog count is probably in the same neighborhood.

    Google Reader’s web interface for the iPhone is pretty useful for skimreading on a handheld. (Iris Mobile, being built on webkit, causes google to give me their iPhone page. !$@#$%$% RIM killed the WinMo version when they bought Torch Mobile)

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