Good Idea! Now find a better one.

How do you know which blogs are consistently wasting your time? Enter Google Reader’s Trends feature and 30 days of data collection.

This is a tale of 3 blogs: Engadget, Techmeme and Lifehacker. According to Google Reader these three blogs produce, on average respectively, 29.4, 22.8 and 13.8 posts per day. Now, I knew they posted a lot and I had become a bit frustrated with the volume but I never suspected this much.

Well, over the past 30 days I’ve gone through my routine, searching for valuable nuggets fed to me from throughout the ‘verse. The numbers for Engadget, Techmeme and Lifehacker? Here you go:

1-3% Quite low, no? But more interesting is that before this month began these numbers were much higher. The difference? Google Reader’s Trends feature reminded me that I need to say “No”. When I see headline after headline on Engadget about a fancy new gadget I have no interest in or blogger after blogger annoucing the same news on Techmeme, why to I declare, “Yes! I will invest my time in reading that!”, and open the post?

There is far too much information in this world to be consumed, I should be saying No much more often. I should only say Yes, when the information, insights, wisdom or encouragement from a given blog help me get where I’m going. Less Yes, More No.

Buh Bye

30 posts a day and I read 1 in 100? You are so fired. But not so fast. What about that 1 post? Can I get that one bit of wheat from among the chaff? Well, I could change my subscription to the category or tag feeds these blogs offer to filter out large swaths of subject matter that don’t interest me.

Not good enough.

I don’t read blogs to consume the fruit of machine analysis. I consume the thoughts, ideas, wisdom, perspective, triumphs and failures of people.

I’m looking for a person, maybe two or three, with a blog who has no interest in the chaff and only wants to talk in depth about the wheat. Not a content factory that comments on everything that comes its way and expects me to figure out how to filter it all.

A few blogs whose posts I read in their entirety more than 75% of the time:
Cafe Hayek
Signal vs. Noise
Cox & Forkum (95%) - this is low, I guess I missed one
Fresh Thinking
Joel on Software (100%)
Andy Rutledge Design View