How do you catch up on blogs when you’ve been away?
As it’s Friday Free for All here on the ever-growing Wardman Wire I thought I would ask a question instead of an opinion, based on something that somebody asked me in a pub recently:
“I was just starting to get into these blogs, but then I went away for two weeks and I haven’t been able to get back into it since. I just can’t figure out what’s happened because there is so much content to trawl through.”
It’s a fair question. With the ever-growing blog-o-sphere in a variety of topic areas and more people turning to Google Reader and other feed aggregation services it’s easy to end up with something that looks more like your mailbox upon your return from absence - hundreds of unread messages.
How do you sort the good stuff from the rambling nonsense? How do you catch up on the blogs?
Simple in Google Reader. Create a tag for those feeds you absolutely must read that may appear in other folders (by subject for example). When you return ONLY check that folder then mark as read everything left unread. Then start again. Its the only way to stay sane (apart from not reading any of them when you return which is equally valid).
Note to self: when commenting firstly write it in wordpad and then copy to blog. This means that when you mistakenly hit the wrong key you make a spelling error and do not lose all of your carefully well-crafted comment!
AAARRRGGHH!
I’ll be back!
STB.
Good question. I do the same as Jeremy. I have a ¨daily¨ tag for newsfeed in addition to others.
Furthermore, I have a ¨lowpriority¨tag for those I read only seldom.
But I bet something better is on the way from GReader.
>How do you sort the good stuff from the rambling nonsense? How do you catch up on the blogs?
Ahem, I read everybody who writes on here except me.
Seriously, I use Feeddemon as I am mainly desktop based - which is now Free.
That lets me put feeds into hierarchical folders, and set up keyword alerts across the feeds I have. If I select the folder, I get a combined version of all the feeds in that folder.
I can also read Gmail and Yahoo Groups as RSS feeds.
Two other options I offer are aggregated feeds (see “Our Feeds and Websites” at then top) for sectors e.g., Welsh and Scottish blogs and Parliamentary bloggers, and a mobile site m.mattwardman.com.
Combined News Feeds are on the way.
Another good things is to find a blog roundup that meets your needs. There are dozens, including the Britblog Roundup Podcast.
Or we now have the best Parliamentary roundup on a UK blog on Thursday afternoons.
Just some thoughts.
OK, I admit it, some mainly self-promotional thoughts ;-).
If there are some feeds you must read - then set up Twitter (link is to my twitter feed - headline from here go through to Twitter. Guido does the same, but I am not aware of many others yet.
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