Trying to pare down the blogroll. There's no way I can survive grading week with as many blogs as I'm trying to follow right now. Dropped most of the "name" bloggers. My bottom line seems to be whether I can imagine myself actually enjoying a conversation with the writer, based on what they've posted publicly. If they feel too foreign in interests or tone, and the potential for interaction seems unlikely, I'm just saying no.
Was perusing kottke's archives, since it seemed unfair to make a keep or toss decision based on vacation postings, and found this most excellent illusion, which my kids will probably like as much as I do.
Must go home now. To bed, perchance to sleep. Back at 8am to watch freshman suffer through a lab practical. Ugh.
You need an aggregator, newsreader, whatchamacallit. With it, you can easily scan new items from many blogs (and other sources) at once. Of the names I recognize on your blogroll, I think all of them provide an RSS newsfeed.
See-
Working the web: Newsreaders http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,781838,00.html
or
RSS For Non-Techie Librarians
http://www.llrx.com/features/rssforlibrarians.htm
Thanks, Matt.
I do have an aggregator, actually...I've played around with NetNewsWireLite, which seems pretty good.
But I like seeing things in their context; the aggregators strips content from context, and that's not good. Much of what I enjoy about blogs is the personalization of presentation, and--perhaps more importantly--the conversations in the comments. I'm not so interested in the "news" as I am in the people, and there's no good way to aggregate that info. :-)
What I plan to do over the break is let my inner cataloger deal with the issue, and try to come up with a solution that works well, both publicly and privately. There are some blogs I want to look at (not just read) every day. There are others on specific topics that I want to look at from time to time (probably a lot of the IA and web design stuff, some of the political, etc).
Part of the problem is (my) mental real estate, part is screen real estate. I'm increasingly thinking its more the latter, which is good, because that's an easier problem to solve.