I had a conversation yesterday with a senior colleague who has long been sceptical about blogging as a medium – which is fair enough: there are limitations, and there is no particular reason for everyone to find blogging, or reading blogs, a useful activity – for either professional or leisure purposes. From prior conversations, he has some idea how and why I use the blog to develop my own concepts, but yesterday was curious how I keep track of other blogs – how I decide which ones to read, how I know when they’ve been updated, and why this sort of reading might be useful as more than a leisure activity, etc. With a bit of difficulty, as it’s not the easiest thing to describe to someone who’s never seen this at work, I talked about RSS and different kinds of readers and tracking services, and about the process of discovering blogs relevant for particular interests.
He then had some questions about how much time it takes to keep track of the blogs I follow, and I explained that there is really only a very small number of blogs that I read, so to speak, “cover to cover”. The rest of the blogs I track are more ways of managing my own strange interdisciplinary interests – keeping rough track of good blogs in a wide range of fields makes it at least reasonably likely that I’ll hear about important new work and trending research themes, in a way that can otherwise be difficult for a non-specialist. When I read blogs for this purpose, I may not read them closely or participate in the discussion, but will often skim entries quickly in order to jot down key authors or titles, so that I can follow up on them later.
For some reason – and I find that things like this often happen when I try to discuss how I use blogging as a professional tool – this then led to the statement – apparently serious: “So… you don’t read books now any more? Blogs have replaced that?” (Evidently, he hasn’t looked into my office, or seen me wandering down the hallway, lately…) I don’t mind this kind of question, but I always find it odd – the implied notion that there is an either/or involved – that I would either use electronic media, or read books – that the committed use of a particular technology necessarily means a devaluation of other technologies… The reality is much more mundane: my major everyday professional purpose for reading blogs is to help me discover and prioritise conventional books and journal articles to read…
Of course, this kind of mining of blogs for information doesn’t account for the bulk of the time I might spend reading other blogs – the smaller number of blogs I read closely, because they are working on similar themes or because I just enjoy the author’s interests and expression, are where most of my attention goes when I have time to read online.
But I still somehow manage to find time to read the odd book here and there, as well… ;-P