One of the things I mention when I present at conferences or to university students is that one of the first things I do in the morning is read my RSS feeds. At times, I’ve had over 1000 feeds in my Google Reader although I’ve whittled this number down significantly. I don’t know, lately, I’ve just found things just are too repetitive, boring, mundane, written for the sake of writing, etc. In other words, I’ve become a bit disinterested in many of the feeds I am reading.
People often ask, “How do you keep up with so many blogs, etc.”. I’ve said in response that I’ve made it a big part of what I do, that I check my RSS before my email, or before diving into those (often) boring academic articles. However, I think something inside my needs a big change. So, today I’ve made the decision to dump all my feeds, and start over.
It’s a bit drastic, but I’m going to start filling up my reader with all of the sources that I can think of from the top of my head, friends and colleagues who I enjoy reading, and who inspire me. From there, as before, I’ll add others that interest me. However, this time, I’ll be much more particular as I really want to be able to interact with those I read. I’m making a commitment. If I read you, I want to also be able to give back.
So my list may be embarrassingly small for the time being. However, change is good, and sometimes drastic change is the best.
For those edubloggers out there, inspiring us all do a better job as educators and as leaders … I’ll find you again.
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I’m tempted to do something similar as I teeter between Google Reader and Bloglines. I’m not reading my feeds particularly well in either and they are both mounting up especially as this is one of the busiest times of the year with mid year reports and interviews. What I wanted to say here was that your experience can sometimes be mirrored when a well known blogger changes platforms (i.e switches from Blogger to WordPress). Some advice would be – don’t because you’ll lose your readership, your Technorati rating will slump (it’s important to some) and you could lose all of the valuable conversation. I disagree – if what is written is worthwhile and strikes a chord, readers will follow you and hunt your web presence down. You’re obviously about to do some re-hunting of your own!
My plan is to delete my reader when I pick up my new tablet and start to customize it. I plan to give flock a try then too. I’ve been trying to think of the top 10 blogs that I read and learn from and will start with adding just those. Twitter is a human filter/aggregator for me. The one thing bugging me about this is that I feel I am replacing blog reading/interaction with twitter to some extent….and twitter is a little more rapid pace, link-exchange, and often spontaneous thoughts… blogs were more reflective of practices and projects.. they aren’t the same and I need to figure out how to balance their respective influences on my learning… but having a new class of blogs to read seems to make sense. I’m well aware of my teacher or schooliness tendency to get stuck in a comfortable rut.. nothing like cleaning out and starting over to keep it fresh!