Getting away from the aggregator
I finally added a proper blogroll today. I've been avoiding it because I always had a link to my Bloglines feeds and it's always hard to decide which links to put up — if you listed every site you visit regularly, and you're like me…, your blogroll would stretch for miles.
But the reason that I did it was that I'm changing the way I use my aggregator. First, I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. I did this for two reasons: (1) Google reader seems to have speeded up, so either they have more servers or they optimized some of that Javascript, and (2) I'm reading less feeds, and I think Bloglines is better for managing a lot of feeds and Reader is better for managing a select few.
I made this feed list decision because I spend too much time reading feeds, losing productivity by getting distracted. It's so easy to check the aggregator to see if there's something more interesting than the task at hand. By deleting the feed, I'm saying that if I want to know what's going on at, say, Reddit, I have to physically type in the URL instead of just noticing a bunch of new RSS entries. It's still really easy for me to procrastinate, but I have to actively choose to go to a new site, so there's an extra buffer between me and screwing around.
Hence the blogroll. It's a way for me to list the sites that I love, without having them hard-coded into my hourly routine via my aggregator. Right now, the feeds I'm monitoring all meet two conditions: (1) they are high personal importance content and (2) infrequently updated. For example, I really value the posts on Freakonomics, but they don't post very frequently (maybe twice a week), so I monitor the feed. On the other hand, I find lots of great stuff through Reddit and Digg, but those sites are updated continuously, causing way to much RSS traffic.
In other words, I'm reverting in many ways to the "low tech" method of actually visiting websites that I'm interested in, even though I still think RSS is a valuable tool. But don't worry other sites — even if you don't make it into Reader, you're still a del.icio.us bookmark.
