I'm overloaded with favorite sites to keep up with, sinking fast in a wealth of fantastic reading material I can never realistically hope to get through. I'm drowning in a sea of blogs.
From expat blogs to travelogues, personal journeys to writing adventures, there's so much good stuff out there and not enough time in the day to read it all.
When I started blogging, I followed everyone who followed me and then some. I subscribed to blogs by email, followed blogs through my Blogger account, and made a mental note to regularly check on those blogs I hadn't followed by other means.
My email subscriptions went through the roof because I'd signed up to anything half-decent, I couldn't keep up with remembering the blogs I needed to pay a visit to, and my Blogger account rapidly spiralled out of control.
Photo credit: MA1216 (Flickr Creative Commons)
I now generally follow other new blog posts through Twitter. When a tweet flashes up from a favorite blogger, I'll click through and read the post. If I get a comment on a post of my own by a fellow blogger, I'll also often head over to their site, my memory triggered by their actions.
All this feels a bit ad hoc to me and it isn't working out.
To become better at managing my reading material, I've tried focusing solely on email subscriptions but all I find is an inbox inundated with blog post summaries every morning. And I fear getting many more emails, I really do.
I've had to unsubscribe from some blogs and then re-subscribe to others I prematurely unsubscribed from. It's almost impossible to reciprocate the comments I get on ISOALLO and Twitter is a beast in itself to manage. Then try following a blogger who posts 2 or 3 times per week and it's game over.
I've not experimented with RSS Feeds or Google Reader or Triberr or any other way of organising my reading material for fear of adding yet another social media application to my growing box of gadgets.
I need a better way to keep up with my favorite sites and a means of ensuring I don't sink further into a quagmire of reading material that can only add noise to an already overloaded daily schedule. I don't want to miss out on the excellent words written by those star bloggers and I want to comment, give my support to their efforts, and contribute to the online conversation.
There's also an illogical fear within that tells me if I don't spread myself around and give back some of the love so willingly given to my own blog, I'll lose valuable readers who are avid bloggers themselves.
So help me out. Tell me what you do.
How do you keep up with your favorite blogs? Google reader? Email subscriptions? RSS feeds? What works best for you?
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