A week or two ago I had a conversation with Stormy about the lost art of blogging, and blog reading. Long ago, Google Reader was a daily routine, and kept me in touch with the blogs that I wanted to read, and made me more likely to write blogs of my own. When Google Reader died, nothing really took its place, and the thing that kinda sorta took its place – Facebook and Twitter – do a terrible, terrible job of giving me the sources I actually want, and, instead, feed me a steady diet of pablum and clickbait.
Yesterday, Anil Dash tweeted about Google Reader, and made some great observations about what an important tool it was for a certain population.
Google’s decision to kill Google Reader was a turning point in enabling media to be manipulated by misinformation campaigns. The difference between individuals choosing the feeds they read & companies doing it for you affects all other forms of media.
— Anil Dash (@anildash) April 2, 2018
The entire Twitter thread is worth reading … and would have made a good blog post.
These two things have inspired me to try Feedly again. It is much better than the last time I tried to use it, and I have high hopes that I’ll actually stick with it this time, and make it part of my daily routine again. I hope. I also hope that this will result in my actually writing again, like I used to do, on a nearly daily basis.
Hi Rich,
I read this in my feed reader 🙂 Running my own Tiny Tiny RSS instance. I can’t shake the habit of reading lots of feeds. Never got into the habit of my own blogging though 🙂
Dave, cool. I looked at running a Tiny Tiny, or one of the others, and never got around to it. I do run Planet/Venus, but that’s somehow different – I’m not sure why, it just doesn’t feel the same. Perhaps the ability to mark stuff read? Not sure.