aggregation Archives | Ian M Rountree

How much time do you spend actually reading blogs?

Yeah, self-serving question – hear me out here.

Justin Kownacki and I are offering a challenge, between July 19th and July 25th, for anyone interested to measure the size of their personal libraries. this came out of a discussion we had about why people share, what they share, and where the perceived benefit is in being in either position; the sharer and the receiver.

We subscribe to blogs almost on an autonomic basis now – last time I counted, before this challenge, I had about 60 blogs on my reader, only three of which I could identify immediately. Why did I add them? What process have I used to flush low-value streams in the past? How can we streamline our intake, and not miss out on high quality content that comes up every so often in the more esoteric feeds we’re aware of?

More appropriately, how much benefit to our weekly routine is the act of consuming all of this content?

In order to measure this – or at least to bring attention to it, even if measurement is difficult, we’d like to offer you a challenge. Here are the guidelines:

Preparation:

Mark All As Read right now – This isn’t a week for catching up, it’s a week for staying on task, or getting ahead, with your reading.
Set aside some time every day to read. Maybe it’s an hour before work; maybe during lunch; maybe just before bed. Maybe all of these.
Assess which physical media you’ll be including in this experiment. Magazines, newspapers, news television – whatever you include normally, be sure to add that to your planned list.
Catalogue your current content commitments. Even if its just a number, write out the amount of media you’re planning to attempt to keep up with. For example, my week will consist of [x] blogs in Google Reader, [x] hours of news television/radio, [x] podcasts and [x] print media.
Mark the time, if you like, by reposting these guidelines to your blog if you have one. Letting people in on the process is a big part of any experiment.

During The Week:

Actually read everything. Getting to “Reader Zero” is a noble task, but it requires that you actually read everything to assess its value.
Resist the urge to subscribe to new blogs, just for this week. Bookmark new sources for review later, by all means, but consider that adding the commitment to new sources in mid-experiment changes the nature of the work.
Take notes, if it helps. By all means, keep a running log of the experiment – I’ll be using #ReadItAll on Twitter to mark my observations.

Wrap-Up (Post experiment):

Now is the time to anti-curate your findings. Which sources turned out to be most useful? Consider promoting them or sharing their content. Which ones turned out to be more detriment than benefit? Unsubscribe immediately. Which ones showed mixed results? Unsubscribe, but bookmark for later review.

Mark the fall-out from your experiment. How many blogs did you start with, how many have you kept? How many bookmarks did you make, finding interesting streams for review? What has this experiment revealed about your reading – and sharing – habits?

Mark your experiences with a follow-up post on Monday, July 26th.

The real goal of the week here is two-fold: to increase understanding of how much we can reasonably consume in a week, and to ensure that we’re consuming media that we both want and need during that time, rather than what we feel we ought to.

Bonus round: Self-examination.

Part of the methodology behind this experiment comes from the patterns Justin and I agreed on noticing in how, and what, people share with others. We’re not trying to discourage sharing, or speculative subscription. That said, what’s beneficial should stay around to provide lasting improvement and information, while uninteresting, or less useful items piling up and frightening you away from your reading should be discarded.

What do you think? Are you in? Join us in examination for #ReadItAll week!

Update: Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins posted a very insightful explaination on SiliconAngle about why #ReadItAll isn’t for him – go check it out!

I have this niggling hatred of social media I can’t nail down the cause for, and I keep running into clues about why. Chris Brogan just made a post about the almost Lovecraftian abstractness of the web. He’s posted about this kind of thing before, but this I think is the first time I’ve managed to make the lateral jump from something he’s said to anything that means much to me. And this is a big one: real contribution – real growth – is of massive importance to me.

Social media is not always growth.

Facebook, Twitter, Delicious. Retweets, reblogs, social bookmarking, Tumblr. How many of the millions of people that are active in these channels actually build something new with them? There’s an opera being composed by crowdsourcing on Twitter, which is wonderful – but how many of the billions of tweets on record right now are retweets? How much of this is actually new?

As a disclosure, I have three twitter accounts, I’m signed up for Delicious and Tumblr – I have a Tumblelog function on my blog. I’ve been Facebooking for just over a year. All of this is useless, at the end of the day.
I got my first free website on Geocities in the middle nineties. I’ve had numerous Angelfire, Tripod and Freewebs websites, owned a total of almost a dozen TLDs, of which five are currently still active. I got my first blog in 1998 – I’ve been writing consistently for more than eleven years, now, my current entry count on this site alone is just over 1400 at this point, and I’ve cropped a huge amount of infantile drivel from my logs before 2004 that never made the tansition from LiveJournal to my own WordPress installation because they were useless.

Find me ten people on the entire web who have been willing to delete bits of their persona-record because it no longer fit. Please. I promise you they’re more interested in contribution than aggregation. People who add content to places – real, honest content – have a bias toward meaning. Bookmarks are not, of themselves, meaningful.

Are you contributing or are you collecting?

I write. A lot. In February, I’ll be going live with a web novel, which will put more than one thousand new words on the web three to five days a week. That’s what I call contribution; new material, new perspective. Even commenting is perspective, sometimes, adding your own weight to a conversation. I know that Brogan’s point about the fragmentation of the web addresses this – that conversations about real content bleed from WordPress (and it’s associated comment love systems like Disq.us and Intense Debate) through to Twitter and Blogger and any of a few dozen venues. But the venues aren’t what I’m talking about, they aren’t the problem. The retweets are.

Retweets are ripples in a pond. They aren’t the content, they’re just the aftereffects of it, but because it’s so popular, so vogue to retweet and trackback and reblog and bookmark, ect ect ect – it’s too much! And none of it’s any good! Why bother?

I get the attraction. By repeating this content, by acting the part of the ripple, you are taking part. You’re adding the weight of the masses to the threat of the king – but it needs to be treated this way, doesn’t it? Fragmentation is not a problem, but you have to call apples apples. Treat the collection as what it is; a collection. Counting your friends on Facebook or MySpace doesn’t mean you’re popular, it just means you convinced a large number of people not to ignore you. Counting your tweets is worthless unless Twitter places in some method of separating the replies and direct messages from the retweets – how else are we to know which are the rocks and which are their ripples?

Your legion is not your own. You’re not as charismatic as you think. I’ll play the broken record and agree that content is king – because at the end of the day, half a billion ripples will never take the place of even a single rock.