Reading Online

There has been a lot of talk lately about what blogs really cost American business.  One site estimates that in 2005, employees will waste 551,000 man years reading blogs.

This got me thinking and I noticed that I used to read a lot of books.  I read books all the time. But I haven’t read a book in several years now.  

I do all my reading on the internet.

I don’t know when I switched, it just kind of slowly happened and I didn’t notice it.

But all my reading is done on the internet. I spend several hours each day reading. Most of what I read comes from bloglines.com – they have a nice format for getting you through a lot of blogs quickly.

You can organize your blogs into folders and then just click one time on the folder and see the summary of all the blogs in that folder.  If the blog has the full post in their RSS feed then you get the whole thing right there and don’t even have to go to the blog unless you want to.

Sometimes you even get the pictures and the links.  I am not sure how that works, sometimes you don’t get the links and pictures and must go to the actual blog the see them.

The best part about reading blogs like this is that no one has figured out a way how to s_p_a_m them.  So you have zero problems in that department.  I was signing up for mailing lists but the unwanted email problem became so great that it started to be more trouble than it was worth.  

The feature that RSS has over email is that you can quickly scan through 50 blogs and decided which ones you want to read, if you are forced to open that many emails it takes a long time.