A Deep Dark Secret About Blogging

Okay, I must confess that there’s a secret that I’ve hidden away from everyone. It’s not a life-altering secret, but I’m afraid that I need to come clean: I don’t read blogs on a regular basis. There’s no need for me to do that. Allow me to explain…

While I have a lot of blogs listed in my blogroll, I don’t go out of my way on a daily basis to read whatever they have. Yes, I do read blogs, but a majority of those blog articles that I happen to either promote or do a writeup here on this blog or talk about elsewhere doesn’t come to me by simply scouring through my blogroll. Rather, I have other mechanisms to bring the news to my attention. This is probably thanks to crowdsourcing through a handly lil’ application called Twitter. Thanks to folks building desktop applications to help manage Twitter, I’ve been able to control what I’m reading and what’s being tweeted – conversation management, if you will.

Now most people will tell you that in order to keep abreast of what’s going on in the world or industry, you should have an RSS reader like Google Reader or plug the RSS entries into Outlook or Entourage (depending on what operating system you’re using), but if you find yourself too busy to look at websites and blogs every single waking moment of the day, then you can do what I do. Turn to Twitter and have your followers point out which articles may give you the best knowledge.

I follow over 1,000 people on Twitter and by using Tweetdeck, Twhirl, or Seesmic Desktop, and to help ease my time online, I trust the people that I follow because I must have found something interesting in them when I followed them, right? So when I see a tweet come across my screen, then if it’s an entertaining enough blurb, I’ll click on the link and perhaps do one of several things:

  1. Bookmark it on Del.icio.us or share it on Facebook.
  2. Retweet it on Twitter.
  3. Blog about what it said or comment on that article.

In doing so, I’ve therefore uncovered some interesting news that will keep me abreast on industry (and non-industry) news. 

But it should be said that the same thing that I said with Twitter is also available and should be done with Facebook & other microblogging applications like Plurk or FriendFeed. These become the more dynamic bookmarking/reader applications that you can use that will be a little bit more appealing as you can bet on some sort of vetting process by your social media friends before it even gets to you.

So ditch Google Reader, Yahoo or Netvibes and put your trust in social media RSS management. It’s more real time and you’ll definitely be exposed to more websites that you may (or may not) have known existed.

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