google reader | Ian M Rountree

I’ve done it, people. I’ve nuked my Google Reader. I just deleted 238 feeds, in less than six clicks.

Why?

Because I was tired of the noise.

Blogging often calls for a delicate balance of signal and noise. With more and more diverse bodies broadcasting, I’ve collected a long list of subscriptions over the years; from educational blogs to business feeds, web comics, architectural blogs, and more. Diversity, I’ve always thought, is important. After all, the secret of the universally interesting person is that they are universally interested.

I’m no longer sure this diversity serves me.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been absent from my blog for most of the summer. A lot of things contributed to this – a move, a change in family situation, focus on my work and health over personal interest. But as the lions of summer calm, and I get back to the pace I’m comfortable producing at, I’m finding there’s very little to comment on any longer. Nothing in the feeds, as I’ve been working my way back into them, has inspired me to action. It’s not that everything is being said already – I’m slowly conquering my imposter syndrome – it’s that so many people are speaking so much, and saying so little.

Google Reader used to be my haven, my arc of knowledge. I dedicated fifteen to twenty minutes twice per day – on the commute to and from work – to chewing through every article I possibly could, skimming or starring for later reading between three and four hundred items. I’ve always been a voracious reader; this is what happens when you come from a highly cerebral family.

Unfortunately, with the shift in attitude the year has brought me, I’m now seeing the old list of rags as a hindrance. The noise has killed the signal.

So, where Read It All Week failed me (twice) – because I was working from a subtract-off model – I figure going blank slate on my Google Reader might save the experience. It’s fortuitous happenstance that I’m doing this the same week Google announced they’ve removed the social aspect of Reader. I’m hoping to treat the product the way I treat anything new I engage in; with measured optimism.

I’ve missed reading, and writing, in a significant way. While it may seem unfortunate that coming back to both means stress and adjustment, I can’t help but see this as a sharp opportunity to examine a habit I took as read for so long, and build better practices out of the work.

The questions then become; How are our habits serving us? What are we getting from them? How can we do things better with the tools we have?

What do you think?

Sharing is a pretty complicated idea, and of all the major methods of blog promotion, one of the trickiest to manage. How people share, when they share, and what they like to have shared with them is both intensely personal, and increasingly communal.

Building a community around what we do is key to any ongoing human endeavour.

So as a blogger, you may want to ask yourself;

What am I sharing when I write?
What benefit can my audience get by passing these shared things on?
How easy can I make it for my audience to identify what they can share?

And, once identified, how easy will it be for them to share what they now have?

Deceptively simple questions, aren’t they?

Thankfully, these days, it’s also deceptively simple to share just about anything you find on the net. From Twitter, to Facebook, to any of the many social bookmarking sites out there, the tools are available to let us pass on the things we want to.

How can we encourage this on our blogs? We can add buttons, widgets like ShareThis, to our posts to help people feel as though they have permission to share. We can include instructions, or requests in our writing. Any of the soft and hard asks are at our disposal.

How, as end users of the blogs we read, can we take advantage of the tools and begin sharing, even if blog authors don’t add these buttons or make these requests?

We can;

Get toolbars like the one from StumbleUpon
Add a Google Reader bookmarklet to our browser, or do the same with tools like bit.ly to share on the go
We can write reactive posts on our own blogs, or
We can make an offer to the blogger to write a guest post on our spaces.

We have many tools at our disposal to not only encourage people to share our work, but to share the works of those we find interesting. It’s important that we keep this exchange running in both directions. Blogging is becoming more of a self-sustaining community every day, and we need to make sure we’re in the camp that’s encouraging conversation. Not the camp that’s relying on being broadcast.

Broadcasting is a great tool. But it’s not a human action. We share, in both directions, because that’s the essence of community.

Image by kevindooley.