After spending a few weeks focused on class assignments, my Google Reader feeds have overwhelmed me. Particularly, my library related blogs feed category has some unknown number of unread posts in it. And I am not particularly interested in catching up.
The dilemma: every once and and a while, hell often every day, there will be some really good posts that come through in this category. Thought provoking, interesting, cool or infuriating posts.
However, to find those posts I have to slog through hundreds of daily one line or one image posts which are along the lines of “Twitter LOLZ!!!” or some other such things which I won’t repeat. People have a right to publish whatever they want on their space, this is not a call for an improvement of the blog medium.
My issue is this. These good posts do not come uniformly from any one source. Lots of different people write different interesting things at different times. I have only 71 total feeds, with most of them library feeds. That is a small amount compared to the number which I know someone like Walt Crawford monitors. However, I have this low number because I have removed almost half of the number of library feeds I read. It used to be a lot worse. But, I feel like I need to do this again.
I look at my bookshelves and I see Paradise Lost and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Anarchy, State and Utopia unread. I think of Montaigne and Emerson and E. B. White and how I want to learn to write essays like them. And I feel anxious at the thought of having to wade through not even the coal but the piles sand, gravel, and disposable plastic use-once-and-never-consider-again pieces of waste, to find the diamonds online. I wish LISNews and the Carnival of the Infosciences did a better job of providing me a digest format of all that went on in the biblioblogsohere. The former does have “This week in LIbraryBlogLand” but for some reason the formating doesn’t come through on me reader and I usually skip it. If anyone else could recommend a good weekly review I will take the suggestion.
In the mean time, I am cutting my feeds down to the bare minimum. I am not a reactionary, and while I think Library 2.0 is just laughable (particularly now that everyone is talking about Twitter), I do think that the Internet is just an amazing hotbed of creativity. I am just having such difficulty sifting the good stuff out from the filler.
Have you tried using LibWorm to search the biblioblogosphere just for the topics you care about? You can run a pretty narrow search (or several) and subscribe to a feed based on that search.
April 16th, 2007, at 6:49 am #I also found myself subscribing to way too many feeds and decided I needed to be more selective. It seemed to me as if many of the library blogs cross reference each other, and several bloggers were devoting a lot of time reading and responding to other people’s blogs. So, I culled my list and only kept blogs by people whose thoughts and ideas I generally liked and a few others that tend to reference other interesting (to me) posts.
Plus, monitoring feeds based on technorati tags (maybe I will add libworm, I have not tried that one yet) and things like the carnival the infosciences help get additional posts too.
I have culled my list to about 15, and don’t think I miss nearly as much that way as when I was trying to keep up with 40-50.
May 1st, 2007, at 1:44 pm #I have culled my list to about 15, and don’t think I miss nearly as much that way as when I was trying to keep up with 40-50.
I completely agree. I have culled my list, and I find that I have the opportunity to actually read the good posts instead of rushing to get my count down to zero.
May 3rd, 2007, at 11:56 am #