Sunday, February 18, 2007

How do you eat yours?

I was reading an "old" post by Fred Wilson and I was wondering how often most people read blogs.

I read blogs only at the weekend in a feed reader (FeedDemon) so it means I work (should reading in leisure time be described in such a way?) through the previous week's posts on the 54 blogs I'm subscribed to at the moment (not counting the feeds that are in my "Delete?" folder) every weekend. In reality most of the blogs only get skimmed through or not looked at at all..

My problem with blogs around IT is that most of them cover the same issues (possibly because they're all reading each other) A perfect example was the iPhone launch. If you've seen one iPhone post you've seen them all.. yes it looks cool, yes we know you want one when it comes out, yes we know that it's tough to say whether it'll be a success because no journalist has yet had a chance to use it themselves, yes we know that it's unusual for Steve Jobs to announce a product that won't be available for another year, yes we know the walled garden approach of Apple is not smart (but soooo Apple), yes we know Apple is ignoring the Chinese market by not supporting a stylus for character support.

I would love to switch to subscribing to "review" feeds.. where someone who has more time on their hands than me reads a load of the top blogs and writes posts summarising what people are saying in the blogosphere and links to the best articles. That way I subscribe to a handful of blogs say "American Tech Roundup" (TechCrunch isn't this.. and it's too high volume.. the ideal review blog should have say one big post on "Social Networking Spring 2007" etc. rather than separate posts on individual services) "China Business Review" etc and can get the latest news and thinking a lot quicker and more easily than reading various blogs and trying to keep up with a flood of posts.

I agree with the comments on Fred Wilson's post about blogs too.. too many posts too frequently on a blog makes me switch off and usually unsubscribe. It depends on the blog though.. China Law Blog is very interesting to me so I can't imagine unsubscribing. On the other hand I was only subscribing to TechCrunch out of a desire to have an overview of the latest sites launching and eventually it got too much for me to pay attention to compared with the value it gave me.

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