By nature I am one who has practiced procrastination up to the level of a fine art and nowhere is this more evident in my dealing with blog and RSS feeds. Not so much in picking up new ones to read, no those I’ll jump on like a well feed news and information junkie. My failing is in knowing when the interest and usefulness of a blog and it’s RSS feed has been reached and it is time to toss it to the recycle bin.

Another area that I think I’m; and possibly a lot more blogger than who would care to admit it, nervous about stepping off the well worn path is in getting up the guts to source lesser known bloggers in my writings. After all bloggers who have made this a career choice live and die by our traffic; and to shift from the almost guaranteed traffic producers as found in the popularity contest known as the A-List to those bloggers slogging away in the trenches will affect our bottom lines.

Knowing that though I have over the last little while been trying hard to link to those bloggers I respect for their thoughts and opinions; regardless of position in the blogosphere hierarchy, rather than to people like Robert Scoble, TechCrunch or Om Malik. As expected I have taken a visitor and page view hit which can be a little depressing from a strictly ego point of view and will have an affect of my hopes of growth to sustainability. However even with all that said I feel better for some reason, maybe a little more honest.

Along with that the other area that bloggers have a really hard time I think in realizing is when the time has come to cut the RSS umbilical cord to blogs that have more of a drain on their time than as providers of good information. It is almost like we have developed a relationship with those feeds and like any relationship breaking up is hard to do so we put it off as long as possible; always hoping that they will redeem themselves once more.

Chances are though that they won’t and in the process we guiltily keep them around clicking on the All Read button to assuage our feelings that maybe tomorrow you’ll unsubscribe in typical procrastinator fashion. Our reasons for needing to excise these broken RSS relationships may vary but in the end they must be removed and replaced with those that bring back the rush that comes from reading something that sparks those creative juices once more.

This is something that I have had to rise above my developed fine art of procrastination and do myself which is why I finally summoned up the courage and broke it off with the following feeds

1. John Chow - John has always been a good source of ways to monetize a blog; some won’t like his methods while others will extol high praise. For me the breaking point has been his recent move to highly monetize his RSS feed. Now I can live with a graphic ad banner or even one or two text ads but when a feed becomes more ads than content then it’s time to say chow
2. Robert Scoble - I’ll still keep his link blog feed around but with Robert’s increasing forays into making his blog more video content than text it is becoming less valuable for me.
3. Jason Calacanis - I get Mahalo .. really I do and I understand that Jason is a self-promoter who has gotten rich that way but I’m not getting any value for my time anymore.

On the other hand I have added some new feeds to bloggers that I have stumbled up and reading them gave me more than enough reasons to add them to my feeds.

1. Mathew K Tabor - for me education is incredibly important especially in our tech world and it is an area we are rapidly losing ground in. Mathew writes well on this subject and helps me get my thoughts about this area flowing.
2. Rex Hammock - while I may not always agree with his opinions it can’t be denied that he doesn’t get you thinking.
3. Alfred Thompson - his post just plain make me think.

Sure it’s hard to break off old relationships or tread new paths and while the rewards may be further down the road than you may like there will be rewards. So get off your procrastinating butts and get some housekeeping done .. it won’t really hurt as much as you might think.

Listening to: Bjorn Lynne - Beneath Another Sky - Starfield

Conversation Tags: blogs, blogging, bloggers, RSS feeds