While I was on the reference desk yesterday (sorry, no refgrunt), I was making use of a short lull by catching up on my blog and news reading. As I sat there skimming over my Bloglines feeds, my colleague and fellow blog fan Steve came up and noticed my subscription total — 59 feeds. He was amazed that I could keep up with so many feeds at once, and I must admit, it does take sometime. Although quite a few of those feeds are not very prolific, there are some writers who make up for those and then some. Steve commented that this volume of content is more reactive than proactive — meaning that I spend more time reading other people’s thoughts and reacting to them than I do coming up with my own. He’s probably right, and that concerns me.
I’ve gone through and cleared out some stuff that was either deadwood or feeds that I’ve stopped reading because they are too time consuming for what I get out of them. I’m left with 52 feeds, but 7 of them are not really serious stuff, more of an alerting service. I suppose that I will be adding more relevant feeds in the future, but for now I’ll try to keep it to just these, and maybe they’ll inspire some original thought that I can post here to keep my readers busy.
On the other hand, a good bit of blogging is about posting one’s own thoughts and reactions to other things, whether they are events in the news or random websites. Perhaps the very nature of blogging is reactive, and those that have made it proactive have moved from blogging to…. what would something proactive be called? Journalism? Something else?
I don’t know. I think it just has to do with the moods we get in, more than laziness or passivity. I know that for me, sometimes I simply feel like writing (I usually do this in bursts), and other times, simply like reading and commenting. If I have a rule or guideline for myself when I blog, it might be that I generally don’t feel like writing about the same stuff other bloggers are writing about, when they’re writing about it…does that make sense? Otherwise, blogs can start to look alike, and I enjoy variety. I admire those folks who always have daily quotes, links, lyrics, media-consumption laundry lists, etc…I’m a terribly undisciplined blogger (to the point where I’m still not sure I consider myself a “blogger”, even though I blog occasionally), but I’m also fortunately not guilt-ridden enough to fret over it much. 😀 So where does that leave it? Well, since blogging is just a hobby for me, I just do what I feel, whether it’s reading or writing, and try to keep some semblance of a balance between the two. It sure ain’t journalism over at fling fling! hahaha