Researchers at University of California, Irvine have conducted a survey of blog readers and I found the results pretty interesting. What really struck me was their finding that "regular blog reading often becomes more habitual and less content oriented". I find that for a good part of a year, I'll read the same sites every day in my feed reader, without really thinking about whether the content is still useful for me to be reading. The linked article describes this as "fulfilling [my] particular routine". I do find that about once a year I'll go through my feed list and evaluate the content of what I'm subscribed to, deciding if I need to continue reading it or if the blog has lost its relevance to me.
Recently I decided to structure my feeds into 3 folders: "must read", "should read", and "free time". I've discovered that I now don't find myself feeling guilty for reading the feeds, as long as I stick to the "must read" folder and ignore the others and, in fact, I don't worry about not being able to read the other folders, now that I've categorized them based on how much time I have. One of the points the article makes is how blog readers do not worry when they do not "read each and every blog post, challenging a common theory that users tend to feel overwhelmed by the need to remain constantly up to date."
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