I had a really busy week last week. Lots going on at work, and a great deal of me being in a car for work and pleasure. This week has been no different and on a lot of fronts I’ve felt like I’m a hamster on a wheel trying to catch up. One of the first things to slide when I get busy is all the blogs I subscribe to through Bloglines. For those who don’t already know, Bloglines is a feed reader that lets me know which blogs have been updated since I last checked–it saves a lot of time wasted by having to click on everybody on my blogroll to see if they’ve posted something new.
Anyway, last night I opened up my Bloglines after a 5 or 6 day absence. 175 new posts. Eep! When I look at all the things I still have to do this week, I almost closed it. I’ve heard other people in similar situations simply open them all and then read none of them. I suppose I am afraid I’ll miss something really interesting or informative, so I don’t do this. My method tends to be to go to the cooking blogs first (easy and fast scans of recipes to see whether it’s something I want to try), then move on to the writing blogs. I tackle the people who tend to write very brief posts next, and in the process of doing that, I wound up unsubscribing to about 4 blogs because I realized it had been months since I had read anything particularly thought provoking on them. The rest I’ve been going through methodically based on the ones who have the fewest new posts, saving all the ones I know will be really juicy or merit more than a quick skim for last. I’m down to 86.
But it got me thinking–in this really busy world of ours, what keeps you reading a blog? I mean, unless you’re not at all like me and have plenty of time to spend reading stuff, your time is limited and you ought to be getting something out of it. The blogs I read (the writing ones anyway) give me stuff to think about–be it craft or marketing or something entirely different. One blog I read (and I’m sorry to say I can’t remember which one right now) has a lovely “Takeaway Truth” at the tail end of her posts, that allows me to give a quick skim. If that’s interesting, I can go back and read the full thing. Other blogs have section headers or bolded points that make it fast and easy to skim for major content.
I realize I don’t do any of this stuff (well hopefully I have a few thought provoking posts floating around somewhere). So my question for you, dear readers, for those of you who keep coming back here, what keeps you reading my blog? And what would you like to see?
2 thoughts on “What Keeps You Reading?”
The reason I keep coming back to A Field of Paper Flowers is that I so often see my name (or nickname as it were), attached to some brilliant thing I said, or there’s something like: Pot suggested I do this or that and she was right. Who doesn’t want to read that?
(Because really, most of what you do post is stuff we talked about between the two of us so the posts usually aren’t new to me.)
In other blogs, I have this great service I subscribe to. My personal blog-reader goes through and reads a whole bunch of writing blogs, and then forwards me the very best of the best posts. Only the ones that are thought-provoking or educational, and worth my time. Ah, the Kettle-reader. Everyone should have one…
Pot.
Hmmm cause you’re my online friend and you write interesting informative posts. Of course some days your posts are just basically progress reports. I didn’t really understand the full purpose of bloglines, but now that I do I’m definitely going to sign up for it. My process has been to click through all the blogs on my blogroll and as you can imagine, that gets tedious. The ability to further organize my blog subscriptions by categories is enough to make my little mouth drool. thanks for the tip!