her real world

By: Melanie

Jul 17 2009

tags: anything, blog, blogosphere, blogs, category, cleaning, design ideas, earth, email, everything, Facebook, favourite, flickr, food, google, grand total, heart, inspiration, internet, internet hangouts, job, life, love, part, photos, picture, post, public, Reader, recipe, silence, something, start, subscription list, time, Twitter, web, webcomics, website

Category: social web

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I was on a conference call this week and was confronted by the question: well who reads blogs anyways? Or something like that. I’m not too worried about getting the quote exactly right, since I’m pretty sure the person who said it won’t be reading this here blog.

But it got me to thinking. Who reads blogs?

I sure do. I read them constantly. Along with my email, Twitter and facebook, Google Reader is one of my main internet hangouts. To prove how much I heart it, I just finished cleaning out my subscription list so that I could give you a grand total of the number of feeds I follow daily.

Ready for it?

194.

In my conference call I said 200, but I wasn’t far off. And when I said it? Shocked silence.

And then something along the lines of: But how?

My answer: Google Reader. I won’t read a blog if they don’t have a feed. Cause if they don’t have a feed, I can’t follow them in Google Reader. I don’t have a list of bookmarked websites that I go to every day to see if they have new content.

I wake up to 1000+ posts from 194 blogs and I read them all from Google Reader.

Now, before you fall off your chair and then wake up and then ask me how I could possibly read 1000+ posts a day and still keep my job, let me explain something. I use the term “read” loosely.

There are some posts that I read in their entirety. Anything from the “people I know” or “people I don’t know” category is read, as they are actual people whose lives I follow from my corner of the blogosphere. I also “read” all of my webcomics (22 in total, not all are updated daily).

I browse all of the home blogs/craft blogs/design blogs quickly, scanning to see if any of the pictures catch my eye. Basically if your blog doesn’t have photos or you clip them or the text out to make me click through so I can pad the stats on your site, I don’t go. I mark any of the ideas I like either ‘design ideas’ or ‘crafting inspiration’ and move on.

On to food blogs. I browse Tastespotting constantly, it’s super easy as it’s just photo after photo after photo of food porn. Sometimes I’ll tag the posts for my recipe file without even reading the recipe, sometimes I click through to get more details. I follow a number of food blogs and I savour those posts the most, I’ll read all of them regardless of whether or not they make me click through or not because I don’t subscribe to any food blog that I’m not in love with.

I browse my “Toronto” blogs quite often as I like to keep up to speed on one of my most favourite places on earth. I also keep super up to date on my public service renewal type friends because they are oh so witty and wonderful.

If I’m having a slow brain day I’ll flip through my photo blogs/art blogs and the Flickr streams that I subscribe to for inspiration and a kick start.

Ummm. Oh then come my “culture” and “life” blogs. Now, I really don’t know how I choose blogs to go into either of these categories other than “culture” blogs tend to have something to do with societies or a society at large and “life” has to do with everything else. Basically the “life” category is the general category that I don’t use because I hate general categories.

I think that’s pretty much it. There are a few others that I kind of keep up with, but they aren’t updated often so I don’t really count them as part of my daily reads. So yeah.

Part of the reason I’m sharing this with you is because I’m going to start writing more about the things I read about, in hopes that I can start a dialogue here and get you all (and by you all I mean my millions of readers) exposed to some new things to read.

Oh and of course, get you on Google Reader to read them. Cause really….how else are you going to keep up!