Just a tick, Sophie Ellis Bextor is singing “murder on the dance floor” on MAX – she is so hot. OK, back to the main thread, Darren Neimke just IM’ed me a link to his thoughts about Robert Scole and his blog reading. It points to an earlier post in which Robert Scoble actually posted a comment. Darren also fed me this link to assist in my research for this post, which, ultimately is going to be a rebuttal to Darren’s posts.

Volume

First up, I have an admission of guilt, I subscribe to over 600 blogs, and as of today 796 unread blog posts. This morning I had no unread blog posts because on the flight down from Melbourne to Hobart I processed the 1600 or so posts that were sitting there from the days (some from weeks before actually). That works out to be around 2.25 seconds per message I got in the hour of “on” time that I got during the flight (for the accent and decent I was reading the Da Vinci Code).

Processing

I’m not sure about the exact method that Robert Scoble uses to process his feeds, but I suspect that its a self optimising algorithm that adjusts to the amount of time available and the volume of posts being processed. For example, last night when I processed that 1600 posts I went to a Search Folder in Outlook and sorted by the received date (I use NewsGator). I then paged down through the messages quickly scanning the list for anything that catches my eye.

That might sound very random but I am actually relying on that amazing muscle – the human brain – to detect patterns and hit mental triggers for things I am interested in. I would typically spend no more than ten seconds per page with each page holding 50 items on my 1920 x 1200 resolution notebook. That means it takes about five and half minutes to quickly scan that many posts. If I encounter something I am interested in I might spend a second or so quickly scanning the actual contents of the post itself and if it passes that inspection I will actually copy the item to the Tasks folder which has the side effect of wrapping a task around it – its queued for later reading when I have a few moments (like now).

Once I have completed my quick scan I will quickly go to the Feeds folder and specifically target a few of my favorite blogs, this includes most of the Australian .NET bloggers (that includes you Darren), Robert Scoble and a few other personal favorites. How long this takes depends 100% on the quality of the posts but because the number of “favorites” I have its a very small number of posts to begin with. Once again, as I find posts I am interested in I queue them for further contemplation in the Tasks folder.

Scalability

Obviously there is a point at which this approach doesn’t scale, so if the blogosphere does double or triple in size (probably will by next week) it’ll be interesting to see how I cope – but thats assuming that there is a proportional growth in my subscribed feeds (I don’t think there will be).

You see, my feeds subscriptions are fairly narrowly focused (technical, .NET mostly), and the kind of people that I want to tune into are those early adopters who got on to the blogosphere early, and I am already subscribed to them.

What I suspect will happen over time is I will start relying on my software to tell me what is interesting and rely less on my manual (but still relitively efficient) technique for finding interesting information. The first generation of these tools are already out there with things like PubSub, Blogdigger and Technorati.

The next step will be having client-side tools which analyse the types of content that you actually open and automatically mining for related feeds. I suspect that within twelve months I’ll probably be subscribed to 1200 feeds, but I won’t know what they are and I’ll probably only see a couple of hundred feeds per day hitting my mailbox.

For the last decade or more we have been desperately putting information out there on the Internet, RSS feeds are all about getting a return on that investment, I intend to cash in big time.

Reason

Many would argue that its an unreasonable use of my own personal time, but its a very subjective argument. I personally enjoy reading blogs and have found that by reading widely that I have found many useful resources that make me a better software engineer – and even help inform my political opinions. Thats ultimately why I do it, if I didn’t see personal value in it then I probably wouldn’t bother.

Darren asks how many things you DON’T do when you spend time reading blogs – my response is – who cares . . .

The 30,000ft View

If you step back a bit and look at the blogosphere as a whole, people like Robert (and even myself to a certain extent) are performing an invaluable service. People that take the time to scan large volumes of posts help create the random connections which link information. I like to think of it as a newborns brain with posts being the electrical signals that cause the neurons to latch onto each other to create new complex behaviours.

P.S. Darren, you’re a hippie who won’t install Outlook