I just got done reading two great posts from Steve Karp on Publishing 2.0. Not only were they incredibly thoughtful and interesting, they were great examples of how tech/new media blogging should be done.
I read a fairly large number of blogs. Okay, maybe not as many as Robert Scoble, but still more than the average Joe. My Google Reader stats inform me that I am currently subscribed to 74 feeds and in the past month I have "read" a little over 2500 posts. That's a lot of information.
For quite a while I prided myself in keeping up with the nitty gritty - knowing about all the different popular memes, what new company was launching, who was raising a third round of financing from Sequoia, etc... I still do pay attention to such things, but I don't find them nearly as interesting. Long gone are the days where I would read the combined daily posts of Techcrunch, Engadget, Mashable, Read/Write Web, and GigaOm, with Scoble's Google Reader shared feed and Hacker News thrown in to pick up the things the big guys missed. Today the only one I read on a daily basis is Techcrunch (and I skim most posts). Engadget with its massive quantity of posts and Mashable's recent lack of quality (i.e. 200+ web 2.0 links for web designers) have been pruned from my feed list.
So what am I reading these days? Thoughtful analysis. According to my stats I have read 100% of the posts from the following blogs: Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Signal vs. Noise, Rough Type, Scripting News, PMarca, A VC and last but not least Publishing 2.0. These guys add stuff to the conversation. They don't regurgitate news, they offer perspective. Sure sometimes there will the occasional news post of which I am already aware, but these guys, with a witty one liner, can make the news worth hearing about again.
Analysis is what's interesting, especially in an age where we are increasingly connected to information streams. We need media to give us better perspective through interviews and investigative reporting.
2 Comments
Hey Dan,
Check out this blog from an entrepreneur, Nick, that I recently met in the Triangle. His company disruptorMonkey is working to create tools to better manage data and the superabundance we are now dealing with.
http://disruptormonkey.typepad.com/monkey/
I have similar blog reading habits. Mashable and RWW/GO I still read occasionally. Sometimes to relax I'll spend 5 minutes perusing em. On a daily basis, its TC and HN or Reddit.
Although 95% of what I read is irrelevant, sometimes those 5% can be worth a lot. For example, you might just hear about that widget that saves you 20 hours of programming something similar yourself.