While I have been multi-tasking on several projects this weekend I have also forced myself to do something pretty uncharacteristic of me, I have completely changed my daily information gathering routine. This plan will go into effect this next week. This is a plan that I have had for a few months now but have only recently taken the time to follow through.
My morning ritual when I start the work day consists of about 7 newspapers / media outlets that I subscribe to or read for free online. I won’t go into which newspapers or media outlets these are, but I will just say that combined they pretty much cover the spectrum and I can start the day pretty confident that I know what’s going on in the world. As far as this part of my morning routine goes, it’s not going to change that much, but once I finish the news, I usually go out and check my Google Reader to see what’s new from the blogosphere.
I don’t think that before this weekend I had any idea as to how many blogs I was following. Some of these blogs are friends, family, etc., that are not frequently updated, so I moved those and tagged those accordingly in my reader, this grouping of content sources rarely takes up any of my time.
The next area that I focused my attention on was the collection of industry related news sources, like TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. Granted, those two are keepers, but there was probably a dozen or more sources that i must have added on a whim at some point and never got around to purging them. A few of these sources more or less quoted everything TechCrunch had on their site and just added a few lines to the top and pushed it out. I asked myself which of these content providers in this category did I want to hang onto and which ones could I trash. I started pondering this and finally out of frustration, I trashed them all. Then I carefully went out to each of these sites, skimmed their last 20 or so posts and asked myself what I could live without. Once I had gone through this process I added the 8 sources that I felt like I get the most value from and moved onto my next category. One thing I kept thinking to myself as I deleted these content providers was how much faster I was going to be able to get through what I wanted to see and then get started on my day. I also took a lot of comfort in knowing that in the worst case scenario that I deleted a provider that broke a major story that impacted the industry, I would find out about it just as quickly on Twitter as I would if I had it popped up on my desktop anyway.
In the past I have followed a lot of bloggers from around the country, I classify and tags these bloggers a little differently than I do people I know from around the state that also blog, this doesn’t mean that they are by any means more relevant or smarter, it just means that I don’t interact w/ them on a daily basis like I do some of the bloggers that I follow from around the state. One of the things that I noticed while I was looking over some of these bloggers that have accumulated such a huge following is that the content they are putting out is pretty much common sense at this point (social media this, social media that, etc.). I didn’t realize it but I was even subscribed to Guy Kawasaki, lol, that’s a stretch for me. In fact, in contrast, a lot of the posts that I saw from the other group of in-state bloggers was a lot more interesting and compelling than some of the stuff that was being put out to millions of followers with a national following.
This got me to thinking, I follow a lot of interesting people on Twitter and occasionally find myself on their blogs reading posts that they tweet about and quickly I thought of about 10 or so of these folks and added them to my other group of bloggers. Many of the true “experts” as people call them are now absent from my daily reading.
Well, this morning I didn’t get to go to church w/ my wife, instead I had a few things that needed to be wrapped up here at the house today so I came in and started my morning as I normally would a business day. I guess you could say that today was the first official run since I streamlined things, and I have to tell you that i wish that I would have done this a long, long, time ago. (kicking myself in the butt right now).
Something else that I am going to make myself get into the habit of doing in the very near future is to share more of the content that I read w/ friends, co-workers, etc. Google Reader has tools built in I think to do that very thing I am pretty sure but I have honestly not used it for much more than an aggregator in the past, so if you use Google Reader, be sure to add me as a friend or whatever so we can share cool things that we run across with one another.
Never judge the book from the cover.Really i got confused about your topic by the heading.Nice post.By blogging we can come to contact with many people. We can share our knowledge and can also get lots of information.
you are right and can’t judge a book from cover.