The folks who I asked to collaboratively write posts here have gone off their separate ways long ago. My own posting slowed down to a crawl a few years back too. In cleaning up the archives this January I was shocked to see no posts for all of 2009.

How did this happen? A lot of blogs taper off, die or get closed down – for, probably, all sorts of reasons. When it comes to web-graphics there are multiple reasons too, but the biggest one is that I stopped reading blogs.

When I first started blogging, it was a perfect compliment to my own efforts to learn more about CSS, HTML, web standards (and more). The blog landscape was already hopping then, but it seemed to be more personal. Then the landscape changed, re-blogging, blogs that mostly consist of posts to other blogs, and the pervasive list-as-content blogs came into prominence. It was hard to judge these new blogging formats – on the one hand, they can be a handy way to discover stuff outside of your own reading network, on the other hand, they add so much noise as to be suffocating.

We are not short of RSS reading tools, many of which have beautiful UI and thoughtfully considered functionality. I feel that none of these readers have been able to solve the essential dilemma of RSS: it feels like work. You have to maintain your list of blogs to read so that you’re not suffering under information overload, yet still getting access to relevant and timely content. This is something I’ve been wrestling with for a long time, and I believe my skill set has suffered for not mastering it.

I do want to read more, to learn more, and in a very interconnected way – to write more. My latest attempt is to take a more active jump into learning how Shaun’s Fever application works. From what I can tell, it has a paradigm that could work for me.

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