This is the second post in my series of introducing you to the common forms of social media. The reason for this series of posts is that a misunderstanding of this media can lead to information overload or infomania. Therefore I thought it was a good idea to post a short series introducing this technology. In the first post we had a closer look at social media, today we turn our attention to blogs. Blogs, and the way you consume them, are a great example of technology that can lead to the productivity paradox, for two reasons:
- the increase in the knowledge contained within blogs does not necessarily translate to an increase in your knowledge, therefore you need to be strategic in how you consume blogs
- the way you consume blogs can lead to information overload, unless you have a strategy to address this overload (more about that below.)
According to Wikipedia.org a blog is
“a contraction of the term “Web log”; is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.”
Commoncraft describes blogs in plain English below:
That’s all good and well, but what about the business perspective?
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.
The Blogosphere: The collective community of all blogs is known as the blogosphere. Since all blogs are on the internet by definition, they may be seen as interconnected and socially networked. Discussions “in the blogosphere” have been used by the media as a gauge of public opinion on various issues.
Blog Search Engines: Several blog search engines are used to search blog contents, such as Bloglines, BlogScope, and Technorati. Technorati, which is among the most popular blog search engines, provides current information on both popular searches and tags used to categorize blog postings.
So what has all this got to do with me and productivity?
Glad you asked. I follow about 100 different blogs at any given moment. The number varies as my interests change and I add or remove blogs to accommodate this. As you can imagine a scenario like this could rapidly lead to information overload. My strategy to avoid this scenario is by subscribing to blogs via RSS feeds (more about RSS feeds in the next installment of this series) with a news reader. News readers are available in many different formats and I use the following:
- a web-based version
- a desktop-based reader
- an iPhone version of the newsreader.
All my feeds are syncronised so I can follow the news whatever my context, e.g. at the office I use Googe Reader, at home an application called NetNewsWire and on my phone an iPhone version of NetNewsWire. Using this approach I only have to open one site (my on-line news reader) or one application (my desktop or iPhone news reader) as opposed to dozens of different sites. Moreover, when I read an article in one place it is automatically marked as read in the other locations, so I don’t have to deal with the same “Unread items” in various locations.
Without a news reader I would never be able to stay abreast of all the information in the blogs. I hope that answers your question.
More about using news readers their utility in addressing the productivity paradox next time.
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