Bookshelf:

Recently Read & Reviewed:

• Alastair Reynolds, Century Rain

Currently Reading:

• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Next Up:

1. Scott Westerfield, The Risen Empire
2. Scott Westerfield, The Killing of Worlds
3. Charles Stross, The Family Trade

Boing Boing... Thud

Here's a poser for you: When does success cross over that line to excess?

I've recently started using RSS readers to follow many journals, blogs and other sites I read (Mac OS X users can download NetNewsWire Lite if you're curious). It's been very handy for following sites which have low traffic, a post here, a post there, maybe a week or two between posts (sort of like, uh, this journal; and yes, I have an RSS feed now too), as well as my regular daily reads. Consequently, I've been using RSS to follow a number of sites I haven't followed previously. And then I discovered the problem with some weblogs.

If your volume is too high, then your weblog becomes less interesting. Indeed, the higher the amount of verbiage you post, the more interesting your verbiage-per-word has to be for me to want to keep reading it.

It's been said that the most popular weblog on the net is Boing Boing. I subscribed to BB's RSS feed several weeks ago, and have been trying valiantly to keep up. Alas, I'm finding that it's just not worth it. Though its authors subtitle it "A Directory of Wonderful Things", a better phrase might be "A Lengthy Enumeration of Stuff Found on the Web", or maybe "Stuff We Found While Surfing and Thought You Ought to Know About, Even Though You Could Probably Find It While Surfing Yourself". I find less than 10% of the posts there interesting, and there can be over a dozen posts a day on occasion. The signal-to-noise ratio is very, very low, there's no particular theme or focus, there's no personal connection to the writers (whose writing styles seem pretty much interchangeable to me), and though the writing is literate it boils down to well-written posts about stuff from the mechanical-claw-vending-machine of the Internet ("Claw decides who will stay, and who will go!"). What's the attraction?

Okay, I'm probably being overly harsh. One man's trash is another man's treasure and all that. The point is that it's a lot of text to read, and much of it is not interesting to me - I have a hard time understanding why more than a small fraction is interesting to anyone - and I think that ultimately it's just not a good blog. Maybe I don't read fast enough, or read too many sites, or spend too much time working, or something. In any event, I finally removed it from my RSS reader; time to stop fooling myself.

It's not the only thing I read which makes me feel this way, though. John Scalzi actually writes two weblogs, Whatever and By The Way. He often posts several times a day in the latter, as well as once or more in the former. I think Whatever is mainly for his extended rants and talks about writing science fiction, while By The Way is more for his personal life, although it seems like they spill over between each other so much that the line is blurred if not downright erased.

Scalzi is an excellent writer - funny, opinionated, writes about a lot of stuff that interests me... and yet, the volume is getting to be too much. Four or five articles in one day is proving to be too much Scalzi to hold my interest. I think that his Whatever articles are the ones I really enjoy and that I'll probably end up dropping By The Way from my reading list.

Now, although I've presented this in the manner of, "Here are some weblogs which have problems", it would be fair enough to turn it around and say, "Here's a reader who has problems with these weblogs so he should just stop reading them." Certainly these sites don't need my help (you know when you shut down a Web page in North Korea that you're a successful blog). Clearly these sites are not meeting a need which I expect them to meet. So what is that need, and why do I expect them to meet it?

As with most people, I surf the Web to read content of interest to me. As with most people (I imagine), what I consider interesting is rather quirky, probably not strictly classifiable. I read sites written by my friends, and sites about subjects which I enjoy reading about or thinking about (baseball, comic books, science fiction, progressive rock). Boing Boing has been mentioned by many other sites I read, as well as a few friends (some of whom are big fans of BB co-author Cory Doctorow, who also writes science fiction, though I have yet to read any of it). So I think I expected that the fact that BB kept popping up in places I follow suggested that I'd enjoy it, when in fact it just turns out that I have friends who enjoy it and I happen not to. As for John Scalzi, I think I enjoyed reading much of Whatever enough that I thought By The Way would also be to my taste, but since I don't know him well (I've only met him once) and the journal is mostly about little details of his family life, it just doesn't resonate for me. And then the fact that these sites are also high volume just exacerbates the problem.

But I think there might be a lesson to be learned by bloggers here, too: Edit and filter your content. Don't write just to write, don't post something just because you found it passingly interesting or amusing. Remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap (do the math: if you're posting 3 times a day, then you're probably putting up 18 crappy posts a week). Don't mistake quantity of content for quality of content.

Then again, it's your blog, or journal, or whatever, so do whatever the hell you want with it! Why listen to me?

After all, it's not like I've shown much indication of having learned anything after 7-1/2 years of been doing this...