Venture Geek

At the end of last month I moved to the South Bay to be closer to my wife’s work (a professor at SJSU). Moving, needless to say, is a bitch — and very time consuming. As a result, I hadn’t read the couple dozen or so blogs I try to follow for a couple weeks, and now that I’m trying to catch up, I realize just how time-consuming it can be to follow the discussion that is the blogosphere, let alone try to engage in that discussion.

Once upon a time I didn’t even use RSS — I just had a list of bookmarks of blogs I visited regularly. I tried a few different RSS readers over the last few years, but these days I just use the built-in RSS support in Safari. At first, I wasn’t into it, but when I worked at Apple last summer I forced myself to try using it for a couple weeks, and now I’m hooked. In fact, I’m so hooked that it has become the primary reason I continue to use Safari as my primary browser, despite the fact that it continually lets me down by being either a) not compatible with the latest Ajaxy goodness (more on why that’s a damn shame in a future post), or b) damn slow. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Safari is quite a good browser (especially when you add in Saft), but I tend to have lots of windows/tabs open, and after a while it just plain bogs down (to be fair, I have found that Firefox and its derivatives aren’t much better on that front). I am hopeful that Flock, with it’s fairly decent built-in RSS reader will be my salvation, but it lacks some basic features in the latest beta (like having folders in the shortcut bar that contain various RSS feeds, or even having sub-folders at all in bookmark collections).

Anyway, the point of this post was that there are too many good bloggers. And, to make matters worse, good bloggers tend to link to other good bloggers, so during a session of catching up on a long list of blogs, I inevitably find several new blogs worth reading (thus, the large number of windows and tabs open at once), making my list of blogs to follow even longer. In the last 3 years I have had to go through a total reset on my blog feed list twice — once the list becomes too long I found it was better to just start from scratch, and the blogs really worthwhile to me come back to the list eventually. I stopped reading political blogs entirely, as they were taking up too much time and only served to agitate me (regardless of the political affiliation). I also jettisoned the notion that I would follow blogs on topics only tangentially interesting to me (though, I do continue to read a few blogs about ColdFusion, even though I rarely write code these days). Most of the blogs I read fall into one of three categories — first are friends. Despite the incredible, perpetual time-crunch of my current lifestyle, I always find time to read the blog posts of my friends, most of which are truly personal blogs, about things like kids, travels, and random life experiences. These are the kinds of blogs that people mock when they write about blogs — “who cares about picture’s of this dude’s cat?”; Answer: I do. For all the wonders of blogs I read by interesting business executives, academics, lawyers, venture capitalists, entrepreneursl, and other professional types, it’s the blogs of my friends, many of whom live far away, that really give me faith in the staying power of the personal publishing revolution. The other blogs I read tend to be either VCs or someone involved in some way with the dizzying array of interesting things happening in the world of Internet-based applications.

Anyway, given that there are too many great bloggers out there, I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide why this rambling post has managed to take up your time thus far….