Serendipity35

I'm just back from EduWeb in Baltimore and folks were blogging away about the conference. I did no blogging at all. I did read a novel. Remember reading books? It felt good.

Technorati is currently tracking 74.8 million blogs and the growth is not slowing down.

Obviously, I like blogging and I enjoy reading blogs, but it's getting overwhelming.

When I go into my Bloglines account where all my current blog interests are aggregated (and lately that's not every day), there are so many unread posts that I almost don't want to start reading.

This is what happened to me with magazine subscriptions. Adding up the few I paid for and the many that I get for free or at some ridiculously low "professional" rate, and the ones that came weekly, I was getting 63 issues a month.

Plus the ADD or OCD or whatever part of me that doesn't want to recycle an issue without at least paging through it didn't help. I had to cut off some reading.

I checked Bloglines just now after a few days away - 665 unread posts. Makes you want to just watch TV.

It's these blogs that have multiple posts each day that are killing me. When I saw how many were in Educational Technology I had to unsubscribe. Same thing with Kept Up (Helping Academic Librarians "Keep Up" With News and Developments In Higher Education). I enjoy the short Quotations Page but I've let so many go by unread that now I'm afraid to open the folder. Open Culture (cultural and educational podcasts, videos, online courses, etc.) has gone unread long enough to have 169 posts.

I'm not currently job hunting, so I should drop the customized search I set up at Monster.com, but I added searches for a marketing internship for my one son, and another search for my Virginia Tech engineering graduate.

The Chronicle's Wired Campus posts more than one a day, so their count is high, as is the Official Google Blog, Educational Technology, Crucial Thought,

I suppose I can drop my "What's New At Netflix" feed that tells me what DVDs were added this week. You only have to read titles, but there's always a hundred or more in that RSS feed. I enjoy discovering Zen Buddhism: In Search of Self, or some foreign film that slipped my mind, but you also have to sift through Hercules and the Masked Rider & Jollybean Kids Mystery.

I could just click on the feed link and then not read them or mark all as read, but then I feel like I missed something really important.

You can check out what's left on my list at the public version on bloglines.com/public/ronkowitz

I'm a little afraid to open up iTunes on my home computer and see how many podcasts I missed from those 48 subscriptions.