Three weeks in to my experiment in measuring my Google Reader stats, I have come to the conclusion that there is too much chaff and not enough wheat. This was mainly fueled by two observations:
- The *average* time devoted to a post lately has dipped under 6 seconds. As an average, this seems a little too low.
- I recently found an interesting article on the NY Times that I realized had been in my reader and yet I blew right past it. This is partially due to the fact that the Times only includes a one sentence summary in their feeds in an effort to get you to click through to the site. Still, I would have been more likely to click through if there were fewer items in the inbox.
I'm taking the following two actions:
- I've cut out a couple of high volume feeds (they shall remain nameless).
- I've been more specific with the feeds where I can be. For example, I unsubscribed to the NY Times Opinion feed and replaced it with the specific columnists (David Brooks) and blogs (TierneyLab, Olivia Judson, By Design) that I find myself reading/sharing most often. The author of post is a very useful filter - it's a lot harder to decide whether to read a post or not based solely on the title.
All Grown Up
13 years ago
Good for you Andy! Making your life less cluttered is a great decision 99.9% of the time. Tell me why you're a David Brooks fan (Not that you shouldn't be, I'm just wondering if I should be a more avid reader). And congrats on the adventure successes! Pictures?
ReplyDeleteI am a David Brooks fan because I think he is extremely perceptive and can really describe things very well. This might be a bit of group think, since I think he and I would agree on a lot of things if we had a chat over dinner. I'm not sure if you saw it already but this post is a good example.
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