things i think i think

So I recently migrated my blog reading to Google Reader which made me realize a few things about blogs and online content. First, content is king. Always and forever. If you don’t have captivating content, fahgettaboutit. What makes Google Reader interesting though is that it aggregates your subscriptions from RSS feeds (in most cases) and thus strips these blog posts of their aesthetic context — meaning that WYSIWIG: content.

Second, I read far too many blogs. By the time I woke up on Monday morning (around 10 AM) I already had 280 some odd new posts from all of my subscriptions to read. By 11:30 I had that number down to about 80 — and that’s filtering through quite a bit of just trite shit. But to have all of my blogs in one place makes it seem far less time-consuming to read them… at least on the surface. So what makes you stand out from the crowd? What makes certain blogs successful and worthwhile? Content, again, is king.

Third, I read many blogs that apparently draw material from each other: Boing Boing runs articles that appear on Lifehacker which becoming trending viral topics on BuzzFeed, which – if it’s a gadget – get mentioned on Engadget or Gizmodo. (And if it’s an Apple product, it’s already all over the place anyway.) So why are these blogs re-reporting everything? Lack of original content. Bingo.