500 Channels, er, Feeds and Nothing to Read

The blogosphere often writes about itself, and the discussion of group blogs vs. individual ones is no exception. Nevertheless, I have seen an increase in quantity and decrease in quality (per post anyway) from a number of top blogs that I read. Maybe coincidentally, these blogs are team affairs now.

It kind of snuck up on me.

Slowly I started finding more and more items each day from certain feeds, and skimming over more and more useless posts. As the post-per-day count increased, it seemed that more filler was appearing. The filler was less interesting, lower quality, pseudo-news (i.e., the obligatory regurgitation of tech semi-news that was already published elsewhere, plus two sentences of uninspired commentary).

Just to keep up with the flow, and to stop wasting my time, I started dialing feeds that had been on full-text mode down to headlines only, to make it easier to skip the garbage. And now I've started tossing a couple of these so-called A-list feeds in the trash altogether; days were going by without an impactful or truly newsworthy item.

These are commercial blogs. Like the commercial TV and mass media from which they originally tried to differentiate themselves, the publishers have elected to fill lots of airtime with bad shows, and then sell the commercial breaks.

The publishers have every right to do that. But if I wanted fake news and comment, I would watch CBS or read cbs.com (not sure if that's even their URL, that's how irrelevant they've made themselves).

But I'm not going to bash these guys (and gals) -- after, they are digging their own graves, at least as far as being in the vanguard media and not the legacy media.

Instead I want to mention and thank a few great bloggers who have elected not to do this even though their audience size is such that they might have. I look forward to reading their work every time an item shows up in my aggregator:

• Marc Andreessen
• Jeff Atwood
• Don Box
• Don Dodge
• Rick Segal
• Scott Guthrie
• Tim Lee

Thanks, guys!