So I've started looking at my blog feed reader and it hit me that I don't really read all of my feeds as much as I skim them to see what new stuff might be happening in the world. The issue is though that I'm finding it harder and harder to find something that I must stop and read. I find that seriously strange. It's not like I've got that much more blogs that I'm reading. I tend to add new blogs to my feed every so selectively.
Sure you have Khoi's little commentary left and right, you have Paul's exhaustive hardware reviews of consumer electronics I will never buy nor really care about. Michael's blog is always an interesting collection of links (mainly movie related ones) from all over the place, Chris's blog usually throws up some cool videos or interesting youtube snippets that I would never have the energy to look for, Journalista always gives me just about everything I could want in terms of comic book bytes and other assorted goodies (oftentimes more than I can possibly grasp). However one trend I've noticed is that the raw bloggers out there have reduced in number.
Oh but Khaled aren't you part of the 9rules network? I've said this before (on another site) but I'll say it again, 9rules is no longer the place it used to be. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's just decidedly different. When I joined a couple of years ago it had something like 50 blogs in total. That's 50 people I more or less knew from the forums. Knew and appreciated and liked and worked with and helped out etc. There are hunderds of memebers on there now, and honestly I don't have the time to go through each one and vet each one.. I guess it was just more manageable in the past, for me at least, as I would add the ENTIRE feed for 9rules. Hell I wouldn't know where to get it now if I tried. Anyone know where the feed for all the blogs from 9rules can be found? Shouldn't that be a pretty prominent thing on this site? Shouldn't you be able to taylor make your own RSS feed of all the various sites that are available to you? Kinda makes sense to me. Don't know how easy it is to implement but I'm sure the guys are more than capable of doing something like that.
A couple of years ago it was this massive buzzing time, where we as bloggers (all of us, including you) ruled the net. Movies lived and died by our buzz (Snakes on a Plane), TV series got second leases on life (Serenity), well partly because of us.
Somedays I honestly feel like we're not all that important anymore. Is it because all new fads become old quickly? Have we passed the 'golden era' of blogging? Is it that there is far too much noise on the net, and it's becoming harder and harder to actually seperate the wheat from the chaff? Is blogging relevant nowadays or is it simply part of the general zeitgeist that is accepted and taken for granted?
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Cerebral Interviews, Design Nation, Featured, Internet, Lifestyle and Technobable
Not sure if "our" use-by date has passed, but I do want to comment on the 9Rules thing. I'm a member too, but not for as long as you have been. Since I was accepted in Round 5 I'm a late addition to the network. I have yet to see how 9rules benefits me or I benefit 9rules in any way. I'm probably stupid, but I don't see the point of it so far.
We've got RSS feeds for each community (member entries or Notes) and we've had a pretty major feature available for over 7 months called Favorites where you can mark members as your "favorite" (click on any Site Profile link next to a member blog entry) and then we'll keep track of all your favorites at your my.9rules Favorites page located at http://9rules.com/my/USERNAME/favorites. It's more like a customized feedreader because we aggregate in only entries from those members and then sort chronologically, but thousands of people use the feature daily.
There's definitely a lot of noise on the net. I have a hard time finding great content, and when I do find it it's with sporadic updates.
Mike, so wait there is no direct feed that I can download and just use in google reader or something similar? I have to visit my.9rules favourite section? Surely though the feed has been generated in order to provide the information to the favourites, so it's not that terrible a leap to be able to offer that as a seperate rss feed right?
I understand that while the favourites is good thing for 9rules traffic, as a user and a member, who has got a limited amount of time to visit various sites etc, I'd much rather have that information in my preferred RSS reader of choice. Is it a hard thing to implement you think?
No it's not hard to put this together with code, and we are working on it for the next version of 9rules, however we've never really had people reach out to us and request it. Of course you could have dropped this idea into the member forums instead of lighting us up at your blog, but what can ya do.
Mikey, duderino, please don't take the fact that I wrote it here rather than on the forums as anything malicious. Seriously. I was writing the post above, and then the thought came into my head, so I wrote it down. Most of my internet communication is done here. I was never meaning to take you guys to task about anything.
You guys have got your battleplan, you've got your priorities and you handle them in any which way you deem fit. From my point of view I was just thinking out aloud about what would make me read more quality blogs and that was one of them, nothing more nothing less. I could have easily called upon any number of other networks out there, but I believe in the 9rules model (with respect to networks) which is why I brought it up, because we should always be one step ahead of the rest, at least with ideas to bringing new ways to better deliver quality content from the large amount of blogs that are currently part of the network.
The core concept (quality content from various personal blogs around the internet, under one banner) behind 9rules should always stay true, even when addition concepts (notes, etc) get added. I think I might post something a little bit more indepth about this and really flesh out what's on my mind.
Hmm, perhaps I shouldn't have commented on the (small) 9rules part of your posting. To me that didn't seem like the biggest part of it, although the comments seem to indicate otherwise.
No no no. Our age hasnt passed. We are the blogger, we're still here and just as important as ever. But as you put it, the noise IS increasing.
There are a lot of sites out there that look and act like blogs, but they're not. And I dont think they'll ever be.
I think the commercial part has taken a big role in the blogging scene and that's why most of the blogger won't be taken serious anymore... By the way, some links in the article don't seem to work correctly.