Overabundance

I love blogging. I ?preach? the blogging creed. I think everyone would, in the long run, benefit from blogging. But blogging is like exercise?it?s hard to explain the benefits in the short term.

?You?re going to put a lot of effort on a regular basis for a small group of posts, get a few hits, maybe some Google juice, and most likely not a single comment or referral for a month or three.?

To which they usually reply ?Sir, I?m calling you to save you money on your car insurance.? Oh. Well, shit.

What can I say, I spread the blogging gospel. But I have a problem. One that Jeremy Zawodny nails pretty thoroughly: There is too much noise in our blogging signals.

For example, I write this blog for a few reasons. One is to document life. The other is to connect to people. The third is to better my writing ability. The fourth is to be loved and respected. The fifth is to be popular. I?m not a popular guy, so we can just say I have four reasons for blogging.

Unfortunately, loving blogs works both ways. It?s like taking in stray cats: You can?t stop at just one. This is what my Onfolio subscriptions panel looks like:

See all of those unread threads? I can barely make it through the ?Must Read? one and even today I spent some time deleting a few unwanted feeds (sorry Neil). I want to find information that pertains to me, but I also see blogging as a creative outlet: I like how these Must Read folks write. I like their opinions. I like the information they share. I want to take part, stay connected, and all that.

But as time goes by and the other Onfolio folders entropy themselves into oblivion, I wonder if there will ever been something better than huge feed threads. Not everyone tags their posts. Even I did for awhile, saw no inherent or immediate benefit (no more links, referrals, or google juice, the three pillars of worthiness in blogging), so I quit doing it. I could pick it back up again, but again, I?m having trouble packing in reading, working, writing, living, and parenting.

Tagging posts would lead to categorizing, something that aggregators are just now showing their ugly seams in terms of adoption. It?s tough to take an un-tagged post and categorize it. What if a joke about George Bush puts the post into the Humor category, or the Political category by mistake?

I wish I had some easy solutions for this one. But at least the ball is rolling. Someone much smarter and well established has made it known that reading hundreds of posts a day of unnecessary crap is a problem. Welcome to my world. Now, as for solutions, the tech world has its ears open. Who will be the first to find a solution and, in turn, reap the rewards?

I go out to the golden age
The spirit is right and the spirit doesn?t change