The Reason I Prefer Browsing To Reading Feeds

I’ve said a number of times that although I use several feed readers, I don’t really use any of them on a regular basis. I use them primarily as a place to bookmark/store/database the blogs I like.  Most of the blogs I read on a regular basis are listed on the right sidebar in my blogroll.

But mostly I like to follow links around the blog world. The links I like to follow can be in blog posts, delicious tags, digg, delicious popular, memorandum, reddit, tailrank, or any other aggregator that I may decide to use at that point in time.

I also find lots of blog posts by following the links in the comments and track backs of my blog and technorati/google/icerocket tracking of links to my blog.

I found a new blog today from a comment to my blog called Chartreuse (BETA) that I like.  It’s now on my blogroll.

Here’s a paragraph from a post on Chartreuse that I like because it explains why I read blogs the way I do and why I avoid feed readers for the most part:

I read a lot of blogs. Really. Most of them suck, (like this one.) What I really like to do is discover new blogs. Discover new voices. That’s where the coolness is in blogs. Finding someone with something new to say. It’s hard to do because people don’t add new people to blogrolls or they fill it with people everyone already know. That sucks.The A list is not really an A list to cool people. It’s an ignore list. People will link to them anyway. And you know an A-lister sucks when he doesn’t include links to anybody else. No blogroll is an arrogance. Do you really think we think you don’t read anyone else? Be like us regular folks and give a little love to those you read. And change it once a month.

I agree with most of this, except that my blogroll is a list of the blogs I read most.  If someone has stayed on there for the past 2 1/2 years (like Seth Godin), then it means I still read them as much as I did back then. I think they should stay on.