Fun fact: this was the first holiday period I have didn’t have to work through in probably the last 12 years. Vacation or Holiday downtime in the past has consisted of me carrying my phone and laptop around with me and being tethered to both over Christmas and New Years. Normally, I’ve always had a smart phone for at a bare minimum the ability to check email and respond quickly, if not having had my laptop within reach to fire up and remote into the office to fix or put out a fire. So since transitioning to the non-IT side for the first time in many years, I was able to simply have time off, unchained from my electronic devices and the worry of a server crashing. For the record, it was awesome.
Fun fact 2: if you dont check your RSS feeds for two weeks you end up with 2800+ unread items.
I’ve had discussions with other people about how we consume media and content. I’ve been an avid user of Google Reader for some time now. I have specific plugins that help me categorize and sift through the hundreds of feeds. I’ve always used Colorful list view as I hated Googles obsession with white space:
See that’s a typical glance at consumption for me, I probably will ready through 50 full articles (or at least skim them) per day, cursory glance another 100-200, and skip over some others. I think on average I’m getting anywhere from 150-300 new articles a day in the full spectrum of everything I’m reading, but I probably only read 25-35% of them. Some are redundant and repeat a bit, some are initially not interesting to me or not subjects that are on my radar. The trends stats are misleading since I read on my phone, ipad, work, and home computers
From your 187 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,332 items, clicked 369 items
Still I don’t have a full frame of reference to compare my reading habits to others. I’d be curious to know if I’m low consumption or high, or maybe just in the middle. Google has made changes to the reader platform that I have not liked in the past that made it almost all but useless. I’ve found that once I get into a consumption habit, the routine is a daily thing and I tend to follow a certain type of reading ritual.
My RSS feed list in its current form is much smaller than when I first started out, and its far more tailored towards work activities now. When I did other forms of blogging many years ago, the list had several hundred feeds on it, now its sitting at a more manageable 187 (though I plan to shrink it down to get rid of the sites that don’t update. Still, I find that Google Reader for me is the best platform for mass media consumption. I don’t use the star function, though I probably should. My fear with that is akin to my fear of thin provisioning. I may forget and let it grow too large.