I have a lot of blogs

Antony’s post about books rang true for me. I also have a lot of books, and struggle with the issues around wealth and attachment. You can become attached to books themselves as physical objects (bookshop browsing is one of my favourite pastimes), or for the learning and experience in them. Material or intellectual avarice, in other words.

But I’m detecting a similar trend at the moment along the same lines, to do with blogs.

Now obviously it doesn’t cost much extra in financial terms to read blogs, assuming one has a computer anyway. Just a bit more electricity. (Although even that immediately introduces a rich/poor divide because many people can’t afford computers and many places in the developing world don’t even have electricity.)

But the sort of issues I’m thinking about are to do with avarice around the experience and time spent reading blogs. To give you an example: In the last week I’ve found half-a-dozen new blogs through comments posted to those I read already. And they’re really, really interesting.

I feel what I can only describe as greedy for all the blogs I now read. (I have many more blogs on my Bloglines subscription than are listed here, plus a few I read that don’t publish RSS feeds.) I don’t want to miss anything. I find myself skimming rather than paying proper attention to what people have written, and keen to get on to the next unread post.

This technique probably works with the business blogs I used to read (and have pretty much got bored with), but for our community blogging about spirituality and so on, a more measured and respectful approach is called for.

So I’m going to cut back on the number of blogs I subscribe to in order to read more fully and slowly what people have gone to such trouble to write, learning from their insights.

I just hope I don’t miss anything… (sound of anxious nail-biting!)