Last month, we were Blogging the Recession. I subscribed to every blog that commented on the original post, as well as to every blog that was posted on my Plurk Blogroll. This meant my subscription list in Google Reader had nearly 200 blogs! And I kept my pledge as best as I could, clicking through to every post in an effort to help out with pennies or page views/comments.
Now that it’s September and I’ve become busy with off-line matters like knitting and football season and whatnot, I’m overwhelmed by the content in my Google Reader.
To deal with it, I’ve unsubscribed to a lot of feeds.
First off my subscription list are those that do not provide full content feeds. Teaser feeds don’t entice me - they irritate the snot out of me. I suppose I understand the motive for teaser feeds and perhaps it works to get more people onto their site and/or leaving comments, but it doesn’t work for me. I offer full-content feeds here and hope that, if so moved, my readers will click through.
Further, while I realize there is no better time than now to post about it, I’ve been put off by more than one blog author posting about the election and/or the candidates from both sides of the aisle. Perhaps I’m becoming more… erm, what’s the right word here? Uptight? Refined? Snooty? Diplomatic? Point is, I just don’t care to discuss or read about political opinions. I’m not persuaded by it and I don’t hope to persuade others to my line of thinking, either.
All that said, I still have 166 subscriptions! A score of them haven’t been updated in months. I spent some time this morning virtually cleaning up and dividing them into categories:
- 8 Artsy (think Post Secret)
- 70 Blogs (didn’t fit into any of the other categories)
- 6 Crafty
- 10 Green
- 14 Feeds (Newsfeeds, forum feeds, etc.)
- 51 Knitters (!)
- 7 Plurk
Sheese!
Update: Having just went through my Google Reader for purposes of catching up, I have unsubscribed to 2 more blogs.
I also wanted to add a point about how lame I find commenting on blogs that use both Captcha and comment moderation. Seems these blogs are also the ones with next-to-no comments. I’m going to let you on a little secret: using both is totally unnecessary and only serves to drive away would-be commenters! I understand (really, I do!) that you don’t want to be spammed, but if you are moderating comments, you can simply reject spam and if you are using Captcha, that will catch the spam. I am boycotting leaving comments on your blog on principle, dammit, ’cause it’s just plain annoying.