11 thoughts on “I love you but we can’t go on like this, never talking”

1. Bill

   Yes. Exactly. That is basi­cally what I felt. Like some­one was try­ing to turn me into pate with all these feeds.

   Espe­cially as I began to get con­trol of my email, it made it clear that I didn’t want another inbox. An inbox is a mes­sage that has been addressed to me, sent to me, that some­one has cho­sen to send to me. I could look at a mes­sage an ask, why did I get this and what I am I sup­posed to do.

   Now imag­ine an inbox where every last mes­sage ended with, FYI. You’d prob­a­bly inter­vene and tell peo­ple not to waster your time for­ward­ing the funny joke they heard or send­ing you another link to a TechCrunch arti­cle. But, it’s RSS, this new tech­nol­ogy and it’s sup­posed to be con­ve­nient, it’s sup­posed to be some­thing we’re sup­posed to do, so we just plug away at all this mean­ing­less information.

   At least with an inbox there is a com­mon thread. It was intended for Alan. With RSS the only com­mon thread is that at some point I found some­thing on someone’s blog inter­est­ing and subscribed.

   You can’t inter­act with every inter­est­ing per­son you meet or every inter­est­ing source of infor­ma­tion you find by com­mit­ting your­self to read­ing every­thing they there­after pro­duce. At least I can’t.

   Once I made the deci­sion to burn my feed reader, I stopped and began think­ing about what my strat­egy is for the infor­ma­tion I con­sume. Well see if com­mu­ni­cat­ing via com­ment sec­tions, Twit­ter and email doesn’t help me pro­duce more of my own content.

   But more than con­tent, I really want to develop an under­stand­ing of top­ics and rela­tion­ships with peo­ple. I’m look­ing at ways of keep­ing my media social.

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2. It was a mat­ter of con­ve­nience to get rid of the Google Reader sub­scrip­tions; I never actu­ally read them any­way, not for a while at least.

   The next thing I need to undo in my habits is surf­ing through a very nar­row set of blogs, the usual sus­pects (and I won’t name them) that always have some­thing new and that are bright and shiny like the bot­tle cap in your eye. ow!

   Next: blog rolls! what else are your friends link­ing to.

   I do like the stream of stuff through deli­cious, which seems to be an alter­nate to twit­ter, with links and tags.

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3. I never thought of Reader as get­ting in the way of look­ing at blogs in situ: I never read the posts in Reader, I always hit the v key to see them in their nat­ural habi­tat. Reader is just a way for me to do that with­out mak­ing my hands hate me by click­ing on hun­dreds of links; it helps me visit other peo­ple, it doesn’t hin­der that.

   The other thing that I like about feed read­ers is that it makes it a lot eas­ier to keep track of friends who only posts once a week, or once a month, or what­ever. Back when I went directly to web sites, I quickly gave up on sites like that; these days, they’re still sit­ting in my sub­scrip­tion list, and I’ll learn about what they have to say on those happy events where they have some­thing fur­ther to say.

   (I do agree that it’s it’s easy to be over­whelmed by the vol­ume of traf­fic in a feed reader.)

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4. David

   I think read­ers are the worst way to keep up with peo­ple who update once a week. With a reader, I have a bunch of mes­sages, when I encounter a friend who updates infre­quently, they are usu­ally writ­ing about some­thing that is out of the hype-​​cycle, some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the other feeds. If don’t have time for them, they get marked as read and I don’t remem­ber them.

   It’s much bet­ter, I think, to have a synapse, won­der what your friend is up to, and go to their blog. If it is every three months, fine. Spend some time get­ting caught up and see­ing them in their con­text. Look at a chan­nel of infor­ma­tion that is all about your friend and read up on your friend using this cool time lapse of their life. While you’re at it, leave some comments.

   This is basi­cally what’s hap­pen­ing now, since I’ve repur­posed my time. I’m read­ing up on Bill, Ryan, Ed and Brian because you’re all in the com­ments sec­tion of my blog.

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5. In prin­ci­ple I agree, but hav­ing things grouped by con­text helps a lot.

   For exam­ple, I have cod­ing (red­dit, etc), AI, trad­ing, fun, science.

   By click­ing each group, I can get in the right head­space for quickly scan­ning these. I then click through to each web­site as inter­est strikes.

   It’s a fast way of cov­er­ing a lot of ground, and inspir­ing myself in ways that if I had to man­u­ally visit each web­site, I wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily see (par­tic­u­larly since a lot of the infor­ma­tion comes from sites I never knew existed — it is, after all, how I found this site).

   How­ever, I do think that get­ting the NUMBER of feeds as close to zero is very valuable.

   Despite my con­tin­ued efforts in this direc­tion though, I won’t be remov­ing yours

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6. Ack. Apolo­gies. If I realised your blog­ging soft­ware auto-​​inserted visual emoti­cons I wouldn’t have done that. *shudder*

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7. Simon, you describe my stan­dard way of deal­ing with mail­ing lists, as well. But you don’t include the over­ar­ch­ing binge/​purge dynamics.

   Ever since they were WAIS servers and LIST­SERVs and GEnie groups, I’d go through a period of cov­er­ing a lot of ground (call it “explo­ration”) and pil­ing every feed of con­ver­sa­tion and recorded knowl­edge in one sorted place. A folder for the RuneQuest stuff, a folder for the bioin­for­mat­ics stuff, a folder for the arti­fi­cial life stuff.

   Whether we’re talk­ing about Gopher or RSS, quickly one finds that most—if not all—of the “feeds” are lan­guish­ing, dead. So then one prunes: save the space and atten­tion by purg­ing all the junk that’s never touched, or full of spam, or noisy. Focus­ing on the high-​​utility sources. Call it “exploitation”.

   And back again.

   I think what’s qual­i­ta­tively dif­fer­ent now is that we’re apply­ing this approach to whole modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, not swathes of one medium. I’m not read­ing RSS feeds of things now, but am watch­ing more of what peo­ple post in my del​.icio​.us net­work and Twit­ter friends list. Less atten­tion to (for instance) the XP mail­ing list, but more atten­tion to the Prag­matic books.

   In start­ing Not An Employee, I think most of us are find­ing that face-​​to-​​face con­ver­sa­tions are more cru­cial (by far) than any dis­cus­sion or mar­ket­ing online.

   What we’ll have to see is whether Alan’s and Ed’s and my retrench­ment per­sists, or if we start using sim­ply shift again to some new feed that engages us more. Is face to face always bet­ter than email, or just a fad?

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8. Alan,

   Hmm, I don’t think what you pro­pose (for friends who rarely update their blogs) would work for me. If I vis­ited their blog fre­quently enough that they typ­i­cally hadn’t updated, then I’d feel like I’d wasted that bit of time /​ mouse click, and would prob­a­bly feel slightly resent­ful (“why did I bother com­ing here?”); I don’t want to feel resent­ful towards my friends.

   And if I solve that prob­lem by increas­ing the time between vis­its so that there’s almost always some­thing in their blog, then I get the inter­est­ing time lapse view; but it means that I’ll be talk­ing about what­ever they were think­ing about weeks or months ago, which makes it harder to have a con­ver­sa­tion with them. (And with other peo­ple who read their blog.) And it means I won’t get to check in with them as often as I’d like.

   Hav­ing said that, I’m quite will­ing to believe that this meth­ods works bet­ter for you than it did for me. And I agree about posts from occa­sional posters being a bit jar­ring in my feed reader; I’ve man­aged to deal with that to my sat­is­fac­tion, but it is a tension.

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10. I stopped read­ing blogs in a reader, and didn’t go back.

    What I did start doing was putting in some pages in a reg­u­lar review rota­tion that search for what I was doing in the near (and far) past, which has the effect of revis­it­ing old dis­cus­sions per­haps long after they hap­pened, and sys­tem­at­i­cally notic­ing more about how old threads played out.

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11. I gave up on some parts of Twit­ter too, in an appro­pri­ately noisy way; those dis­cus­sions ref­er­ence Alan’s orig­i­nal, to close the loop.

    http://​viel​metti​.type​pad​.com/​v​a​c​u​u​m​/​2​0​0​8​/​1​0​/​t​w​i​t​t​e​r​-​z​e​r​o​.​h​tml

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