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Getting back into blog reading

One early upshot of my temporary Twitter hiatus was to realise how much I was missing picking up on other people’s blog posts. Twitter had become my single notification channel for new posts from people I know as well as discovering new ones.

Having said that I’ve been aware that I have been reading blogs less and relying on the Twitter stream more and I miss spending longer reading what other people are thinking.

So, yesterday I resolved to get back into reading blogs on a regular basis.

Up until about 3 years ago I had a routine based around Google Reader which helped me to subscribe and follow various RSS fields. Most mornings  I would spend 20-30 mins scanning my feeds and picking out the ones that looked more promising. Mostly it was just consuming but occasionally I’d build a blog post of my own around what I’d read.

Google Reader is no more but there is a handy equivalent aptly called Old Reader, basically a clone of the latter.

The changing blogging landscape

I’d imported my feeds into Old Reader ages ago before I got out of the blog reading habit so my first job was to go through and unsubscribe from blogs that were no longer relevant to me (lots of specialist ones about eportfolios for example) or were obviously inactive.

What surprised me was how many blogs that had once been very active hadn’t been posted to in years. Some had even let their domain subscriptions expire. This in itself shouldn’t be that surprising. I’m doing a very different job to what I was doing at Netskills (when I’d last been in the blog-reading habit) and that will be true of most people.

But you could also read it as a result of the way that our use of the social web has changed over the last few years, away from longer form writing to updates on more closed platforms.

People still blog but there seems to be less of culture around the practice, or rather that I’ve let myself lose track of it. Maybe there’s something about the rise of “thread” posting on Twitter indicates that there’s still an appetite for articulating more extended thinking. I have a problem with “threads” as an alternative to blogging but that’ll have to wait for another post.

Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older but I find that I want to take my time over things more these days and engage more deeply. Rekindling my interest in blogs might be a way of doing that. I’ll try it out for a bit and see if I get back into the habit.

So, help me out here. Which blogs do you read on a regular basis? Who’s writing good stuff about TEL?

Please RT. 😉

 

 

One reply on “Getting back into blog reading”

This list will grow but this is who I’m subscribed to to begin with (in no particular order)…
– Marcus Elliott https://marcuselliott.co.uk/
– Kerry Pinny https://kerrypinny.com/
– David Hopkins http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/
– James Clay http://elearningstuff.net/
– Donna Lanclos http://atkinsanthro.blogspot.com/
– Lawrie Phipps http://lawriephipps.co.uk/Martin Weller http://blog.edtechie.net/ (the first blog I ever followed!)
– Matt Lingard https://mattlingard.wordpress.com/
– Google Maps Mania http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/
– Digital Storytelling Centre http://storycenter.org/blog/
– The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling http://storytelling.research.southwales.ac.uk/
– Sue Watling https://digitalacademicblog.wordpress.com/
– Middlebury Office of Digital Learning http://digitallearning.middcreate.net/
– Audrey Watters http://audreywatters.com/
– Dave White http://daveowhite.com/

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