A couple months ago I noticed that I had subscribed to almost 200 feeds on bloglines. Although they were all good blogs I realized that I had been avoiding checking up on them simply because it seemed a bit daunting to login to bloglines and see that I had hundreds of unread items. As a result of my reluctance to check my bloglines account on a consistent basis I was missing a lot of good posts, so I decided that I would narrow down my choice of subscriptions to maybe only 20-30 blogs that I really felt were the most important. At the same time I decided I would also like to try out a new feed reader to see if they offered better features than bloglines.
A few weeks ago I heard from Paul Allen that Google Reader tracked your reading habits and would generate reports of what you have been reading over time. I thought this was a cool feature that may help me prioritize which blogs I should stay subscribed to and which blogs I should drop in case my list got too big again. So I left bloglines and have been using Google Reader ever since. I decided I wanted to start off from scratch and only initially subscribe to the blogs that I could think of off the top of my head. Over the last few weeks I added a few more, but have still managed to keep the list down to a size where I could reasonably read every post if I wanted to (usually I just a select a few that seem the most interesting) even if I have been gone for a few days. I wanted to share my list of the blogs I have decided to subscribe to. Don’t feel bad if your blog is not on the list, it may have been on my old bloglines list, and may show up in the future on my new Google reader list (Google reader seems to help me organize my feeds a lot better than bloglines so I may be subscribing to a lot more feeds in the future). Here is the current list:
Chad Blodgett | feed
Chris Knudsen | feed
Connor’s Conundrums | feed
Don Loper | feed
John Jonas Blog | feed
Paul Allen: Internet Entrepreneur | feed
Russell Page | feed
Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing | feed
The Carolynn Blog | feed
Macalua.com | feed
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO | feed
Pronet Advertising | feed
feed SEO Book.com
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog | feed
How to Change the World | feed
Copyblogger | feed
MarketingVOX - The Voice of Online Marketing | feed
Seth’s Blog | feed
Shoemoney - Skills to pay the bills | feed
Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim | feed
John Chow dot Com | feed
ProBlogger Blog Tips | feed
In a few weeks once I have collected more data on my reading habits I will posting a ranked list of the blogs I read the most.
1 comment so far ↓
[...] One popular reasons given for using partial feeds as opposed to full feeds is that it increases website visitors. If you let people have your full feed they will just consume your content through a feed reader and never visit your site, so you have to offer just a partial feed so they will have to click through to your website and read your full post, right? … Wrong! Several recent posts say otherwise. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and find out it only offers a partial feed I unsubscribe immediately in almost all cases. On the rare occasion that I do stay subscribed I end up reading less of the content than I would have had they offered a full feed, simply because clicking through to a website is just an extra step that I am reluctant to take, because it takes me away from all the other good content in my feed reader provided by all the other blogs who let me subscribe to a full feed. There is a lot of good content out there and I am always looking for ways to sift through it all. By offering only a partial feed you are pretty much guaranteeing that I will place your content in the never return category. One exception to this is Aaron Wall’s SEOBook. He offers great content that I wouldn’t want to miss it, but his blog is the only exception. [...]
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