Saturday, July 28, 2007

Attention Crash and RSS Feeds

I'll admit it...I'm a blogging addict. I like to post and I also enjoy reading posts and commenting at other sites. I don't actually surf to most sites though. Instead I follow their RSS feeds using Bloglines (which I'm not entirely happy with lately -- let me know what your favorite RSS tool is). A feed reader is convenient in that you can quickly scan posts and just click on a few of interest. But even with that, the number of blogs I was following was getting out of control.

Several weeks ago I ran across a post by Steve Rubel on the Micro Persuation blog about Attention Crash. In short, he makes the point that information is relatively easy to get everywhere. From newspapers, TV, radio, the Internet, mobile phones, etc. In fact, information is so plentiful that it's easy to overwhelm your capability to keep up.

I reached an attention crash. I've cut back on the number of blogs I'm reading regularly. I have a few groups I look at almost daily (e.g. photo sites, cooking/recipe sites, news sites, local blogs). There are a couple others tossed in -- a gadget site, a couple humor sites, and a couple folks who are frequent visitors. That keeps it more manageable. Am I missing some things? Probably. But if they are very important or viral, they'll probably show up on one of these sites. At least I'm not feeling guilty for getting behind on my RSS reading or experiencing a regular, personal attention crash.

1 comment:

Erika Jean said...

I have felt overwhelmed before too. I used to feel obligated to visit and comment at the blogs of people who let me comments... then I decided it was just too much work. Now I just stick to what I like to read. not what I feel like I should have to read. ya know?