My SO CALLED FRIEND, Steve Drace, finds and sends me links to the most improbable, yet interesting, sites, blogs, and knicknacks on the Web. It's maddening, for two reasons, which I fired back at him today:
Steve:
1. Where do you FIND this stuff? And (second part of question) when do you have TIME to find, read, and select the good parts??
2. Do you know how hard I have worked to winnow down my Bloglines feed list to under 100 feeds? It's like cutting off fingers. Now I just ADDED the feed for the blog Your Monkey Called, and because I can't resist clicking on a link that says "and he wants his tapes and pamphlets back," which took me to You Look Nice Today, "The audio-based Journal of Emotional Hygiene," which turned out to be a combo blog and audio blog full of sarcasm, so I added THAT TOO. I fail to resist sarcasm.
My blog list has become like my home library, like my video library, like my WINE library, ferchrissakes, and like my browser bookmarks (abandon hope all ye etc.) -- if I did nothing all my waking hours but read blog posts, I'd never catch up if I lived to be 100! Even in the unlikely event that I stop subscribing to NEW ones!
Jeez.
Hey, wait -- I think I have a blog post!
Yay!
PS: Your Monkey Called was highlighted by Steve for a recent post called "Book Titles, If They Were Written Today," such as
"Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them"
Today their infinite amusement consists of this entry:
I LOVE HER NAME, I DO
This winter, the BBC brings you a gripping new crime drama…AMANPOUR
A fragrance. A dream. Remembered. Forgotten. Ralph Lauren presents…AMANPOUR
In a world where no man is equal until he has proven himself in a sweaty tropical locale, one man rises above the others. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in Baz Luhrmann’s…AMANPOUR
Crème fraîche over strawberries makes the most delicious…AMANPOUR
---
How can one resist? Now I have to fall behind on THIS too! Arrrrghhh!
When I was Reviews Editor of InfoWorld in the 80s, I would get a stack of (postal) mail literally three feet high, every morning. Obtaining an electric envelope-opener was a major convenience -- as was obtaining an assistant to actually do the work, since slicing open the envelopes was the half of it -- you had to remove the material from the envelope, unfold it (usually), and place it in the pile.
Then I'd go through the pile, throwing out the 60% irrelevant. Then go through the remainder again to sort into Useful/Interesting and Dunno Yet.
That took an hour each morning.
By mid-90s, I got almost no physical mail at all. I was editor-in-chief of SunWorld Online, so most relevant mail went to my editors; but communications were mostly through email. That meant about 100 relevant emails a day -- plus 200 or so spam messages. I had two dozen subfolders in my inbox to sort through it all and felt it was a great personal victory to sort my inbox down to under 100 active messages on any given day. (Of course, filed-away mail was often forgotten thereafter.)
I also subscribed to about two dozen magazines at work, mostly free trade and professional journals, which piled up in the corner with only an article or two read in each. At home I subscribed to another 18 or so computer magazines plus fun reading like Forbes and Wired. Never kept up on them either. By the year zero (2000), I had cancelled most pubs and was down to perhaps five.
I retired three years ago and the first thing I did was subscribe to The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, Now That I Finally Have Time to Read Them -- fatally innocent conceit!
The WSJ, my favorite newspaper in the world, plus two local papers (the metro and the local), extended my breakfast to two hours each morning. I couldn't keep it up -- it was just too much. And The Economist--my god, what a labor that came to be! It covers all the topics you normally skip by or don't get much sense out of in the regular press -- especially what's going on in other countries -- and you *think * you can just skim through them and get a sense of what's going on in the rest of the world -- but you dip into *any* article and the high-quality writing and the depth of your ignorance combine to force you to read the whole article.
Since the magazine is 100 pages with not more than 10 pages of ads, that's 90 dense pages of text every week on MEGO subjects (Mine Eyes Glaze Over -- a Washington term for Very Important but Very Boring subject matter, like the Fed or Kazakhstan). It takes *hours* to read the thing. And while you're in the middle of reading it -- here comes another issue!
Tip for magazine publishers: A magazine whose main virtue is that you can skim through it quickly and toss it should not be dismissed. When I subscribed to all those tech pubs, the lighter ones that I could skim-and-toss in ten minutes I read every week -- Wired, I still have back issues from the 90s here!
Then I installed Bloglines and joined to the great Blog revolution. Despite occasional severe pruning, I have 96 feeds, some with 200 unread blogs, others with two or three hundred Saved blog writings. I love it; I can't spend four hours a day on it. Of course, I started four blogs of my own, to add to the general noise level. Sigh.
I finally signed up for Twitter, which offered me the opportunity to Follow the tweets of the people in my Gmail contacts list -- it turns out 82 of my friends and colleagues are Twittering. Eighty-two.
I Followed them all, just to get my feet wet. I now spend 20 minutes twice a day scrolling through Tweets, almost all of which aren't especially of interest to me. I UnFollowed two friends today and it was like losing five pounds.
Ovewhelmed by info? Oh yeah. Yet I love the stream of info, some of which is amazing, fascinating, amusing, shocking. Bury me with my stacked-up magazines, and my laptop tuned to Twitter and Bloglines -- I'll smile all the way to damnation, and complain to St Peter about it.
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