I have felt the need to clean out my reader recently. I simply don\’t have as much time as I used to and it would be nice to focus on the blogs that I actually interact with, or find interesting books on, rather than have a bunch of posts to go through that I just end up skipping. I tried to be very systematic about this. In case anyone\’s curious, these are the criteria I used to decide which blogs to keep in my reader, or let go:
How much I look forward to reading a blog
If I distinctly recall visiting a blog recently, or noticed that the blogger visited me
If we have conversations via comments or email
If I added a book to my TBR within the past two years, from reading their blog
Blogs that I haven\’t felt compelled to read frequently or gotten book recommendations from, for the most part got moved off my reader. Not to mention blogs that haven\’t posted anything new in the past six months or more, going defunct themselves (it happens).
I was rather surprised to find that 25 of the blogs I\’ve followed for a long time and am quite familiar with, haven\’t actually interacted with me in months, or mentioned any books I\’d like to read. I had not really noticed that our reading interests no longer converge…
I did realize that I\’m discovering new blogs in a different way now. I used to go through other bloggers\’ link lists, but it\’s been a long time now since I\’ve done that. What I have been doing lately, is searching for other reviews of books I\’ve read to link to when I make my posts. Often I find new blogs that way, with more similar reading tastes.