Element Fusion

It occurs to me that reading blogs is a very unusual discipline. The reason is because the only way to really get anything out of blog reading is to aggregate a ton of content and then become your own human filter to pull out the pieces you want to read.

Sure, you can find one or two bloggers out there who might write post after post that you want to read, and it's easy to follow them. But, if you really want to experience the power of this information phenomenon, you have to aggregate and filter. That's because there are a whole bunch of blogs out there that every once and a while might write something I want to read. To get to that nugget of great content, I've got to be willing to skip over a ton of other content that will only serve to clutter my mind.

This whole process is really pretty unique if you think about it. For a while, I had trouble with it because it was hard for me to skip so much content. I would think "why am I subscribed to this feed if I'm skipping more than half of what they're publishing." But then I realized, that's the whole thing with reading blogs. It's a discipline of filtering. You have to become ok with ignoring most of what you see, but if you never go out and see it, then you can't find that one gem of content that is really helpful.

I know, I know, there are tons of social media, content-promoting sites that claim to help you find the stuff that most interests you. But I still believe that no matter what service you are using -- search feed aggregation, StumbleUpon, Digg ... etc. -- you are still going to have to filter out more than 50% of what you see. That's just the discipline of blog reading.