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how i read so many blogs

It is inefficient to type in URLs (or check bookmarks), so I add RSS feeds to my Google homepage. Unfortunately, that means that private blogs are not checked daily, but weekly.

So, I see that one of the 40 blogs (or so, I don't know) I keep tabs on has a new post. I'll click on the "+" sign, and see if it's of any interest. Then I open the blog in a new tab. There are blogs I'll check no matter what, but they're usually by people I know personally. If you are a friend, I read you, even if you are boring. By now, I have a few pretty good friends in the blogosphere (AT, SEK, BW, DG, JRO, BDB) whose personal blogs I read. But that is not too many to keep up with on a daily basis. Also, they don't post daily, which is helpful.

Others are blog/scholarly acquaintances whom I'm glad to read and learn from, but I can wait a day or two to read the posts, and I don't read all of the posts. Fortunately, they all tend to congregate on the same group blogs (Scatterplot, OrgTheory, Concurring Opinions, Balkinization, PrawfsBlawg, MoneyLaw, Legal Theory Blog (individual, but how can you not read Larry Solum), Feminist Law Profs, Unfogged, Crooked Timber (and friends thereof, like WickedA and Pitse1eh) making reading pretty easy and efficient.

I definitely don't read every post on those group blogs--a dilettante can only be interested in so many things. I also am not good at getting involved in comment threads, which saves time. So really, my daily reading is not much, but probably more than it should be if I actually want to get more work done and read more novels, which is why I am going to uninstall IE on my next computer and install Leechblock to control my browsing. I try to keep browsing to a couple of hours a day, but just saying that makes me realize that I'm spending too much time browsing. Time for Leechblock!

Very few blogs are not law or social science related, or not the personal blogs of friends. I occasionally read The Valve (it makes me miss being an English major), and maybe I'll cruise by Jezebel or Slashdot once in a while. I recently added the Convictions and XX blogs from Slate, and I read Broadsheet from Salon. I should add Feministe and Feministing, but for some reason I haven't. I do read Feminist Philosophers, though.

So I tried to use Google Reader, and I don't know how people do it. Also, SEK keeps sharing stuff with me, and it is just way more than I can handle, and I'm not going to read another blogpost criticizing Stanley Fish, who I already think sucks. And I'm a person who has over 20 blogs on my iGoogle, plus newspapers and online magazines. More than I can handle, man.

How do you keep up with your blog habits?

Full post as published by Law and Letters on May 06, 2008 (boomark / email).