Unsubscribing from Blogs Feels Good

October 25, 2007 in Personal, Web by Carsten Pötter | View Comments

Over the last couple of weeks I have started unsubscribing from quite a lot of blogs. It’s been about 50 blogs so far and I guess, there will be more. I just can’t keep up with the constant flow of information anymore. I have tried reducing the number of feeds before but never actually started.
The main reason is my limited time to read them all. I have no internet access at work so I have to read all blog posts of the day when coming home. Yeah, I don’t have to, there’s this nice button in Google Reader called Mark all as read and I have used it really often recently. But why stay subscribed to a blog when I never read it? Right, there is no good reason.

So which blogs have been hit by my unsubscription rampage? Surprisingly – even to me – really big ones: Micro Persuasion, Mashable, Scoble, Gizmodo, Calacanis, TechCrunch, Engadget, Deutsche Startups,… I have hardly unsubscribed from smaller blogs. I guess they are more personal, voice opinions and share experiences and therefore add some more value to the news. It may sound unfair but sometimes blogs like Mashable and Deutsche Startups seem like nothing more than outlets for press releases to me. Will I miss any important trends in tech and the internet now? I don’t think so. I still read Techmeme and Rivva.

I have some more spare time now – and I intend to have more – which I don’t want to spend on the internet. I will read some books, listen to music, hang out with friends, eventually becoming independent of my feed reader.

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  • the cool guys use googlereader anyway :D
  • Carsten Pötter
    Ha, I am still subscribed to all of you guys. :)

    I don't know if it is a reaction to this blog post but FeedBurner has reported that most of the Bloglines subscribers have unsubscribed. ;)
    It's probably just an error by FeedBurner, though.
  • I don't read any of the big ones either, they're putting out too much content of which only a small part is of interest for me. Instead, I think I'm using other, smaller blogs to filter through all the posting and pick the good ones for me. Of course, they are more personal and I built up a relationship of some kind with many of their authors. So, yeah, it makes sense to me to reduce the white noise and do something else more often ;O)
  • I hear ya Carsten.
    Although I don't unsubscribe anymore. I just put the feeds I don't or barely read anymore into a separate folder in greader for archiving purposes. so whenever I gonna write about something I can perform for researching a search on sources I trust on. Less noise then doing a normal blogsearch. :)
  • Ich hoffe meiner hat das ausmisten überlebt ;)
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