Blog

I read 300+ blog posts a day thanks to Google Reader. It’s my homepage. Every time I open my browser I’m bombarded with new postings. I’ve done this for almost a year now. Before that I visited the individual blogs.

Jakob Lodwick makes the following point in a post today:

This urge to make everything automatically syndicated and aggregated into custom streams does have a trade-off. You’re trading identity for efficiency.

This provides a few shocking realizations for me.

1. All that I’ve done online lately is consume and reorganize. I don’t create enough. Sure, I’m creating right now. But, it’s not enough. This is partially a result of being in law school, which has significantly squashed the time I have to think about meaningful creative endeavors. Or even read a novel.

2. In the past I’ve spent hours modifying the look and feel of my other blog – Yugflog.com – so that it is appealing and appropriate to the subject matter. If all of that was never seen because it was only read through RSS feeds, that would be a lot of wasted work on my part.

So what? While the 2D web-space is becoming increasingly visually stimulating and full of rich content, my way of dealing with it is to reduce it to uniform text in a linear stream. Not only that, but no one blog, micro-blog, tumblelog, video site, or website stands out. All of the information is slurred together.

I should care more about who is saying what.

I should care more about what it looks like.

I should care more about giving back as much as I take in a qualitative, not quantitative, manner.

To do that I’m going to stop reading my RSS feeds every spare second. I’m going to evaluate what I can do with my time that would be either (a) more productive or (b) more creative.