No More RSS!!!RSS has ruined my life. It really has. Everyday, right in my inbox, I get a stream of stuff begging to be read (I use Opera’s excellent built in RSS reader and mail client, which integrates email and RSS).

What originally started as a good way to keep up to date without having to go look nowhere has turned into 300+ posts a day clogging my inbox. Going through all the feeds now takes up so much of my time that it is almost worse than spam. If, heaven forbid, I take a day (or week) off, clearing the backlog becomes virtual torture, as I am forced to sift through yet another post about Yahoo’s new NOYDIR robots directive metatag.

What’s worse, the number of feeds I have subscirbed to just keeps climbing, as people like Lee Odden release hundreds of RSS feeds in a single download. Great, just what I need, more stuff to read!

You know what? I have stopped reading. And by “stopped reading” I mean pretty much everything.

It isn’t that people don’t have interesting stuff to say, it is just that, well, they say way to much of it :)

The cross-blog nature of topics makes this phenomenon even worse, as far too many blog are written as if it is the only blog I’m going to read. As each blog rolls out the same old hackneyed topics, usually repeating ad nauseam what someone more informed had to say, the word “news” in many blogs tagline begins to seem just a tad ironic.

But it isn’t all bad (and my whine is now over) because, amidst this doom and gloom, there are several original, unique, funny, intelligent or just plain brilliant blogs that I always promise to at least glance at (I can’t promise I’ll read, but then we know no one reads online anyway).

So without further ado, I share with you the only blogs I always bother to (at least) look at (in no particular order).

On-Topic

  1. RSS Small Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

    2. Andy Beal has an interesting and original take on not just all things search, but on running an actual Search business. Unlike the monotonous search news blogs, Andy’s is actually offerring a unique and original perspective on SEM.

  2. RSS Small SEOMoz

    3. Everyone knows it is interesting, but with posts like this financial data, it is also rediculously open. Rand, you are a legend (even if your romantic stunts have made my anti-marriage stance less popular than even I imagined it could be).

  3. RSS Small Bruce Clay Blog

    4. Lisa Barone does a great job, even if she does get her hate on for Wikipedia… regularly.

  4. RSS Small SEO By The Sea

    5. Whilst most blog posts take seconds to read and are written at a 3rd grade reading level, Bill’s posts stand out for their intelligence. To be honest, I don’t always read Bill’s posts, because they require time to digest, time I often don’t have. Instead, I take a few hours every now and then to actually read and digest what Bill wrote. Each and every time I do, I am more than happy I did.

    This is really the highest form of praise, because whilst I’ll scan other people’s posts on the list, I actually read (and consider) Bill’s.

Slightly Off Topic

  1. RSS Small Shameless plug: isos

    2. Funny, insightful, brilliant (if I do say so myself).

  2. RSS Small Jeremy Zawodny’s Linkblog

    3. Some people claim to find good stuff. Jeremy actually does. Good links daily on anything (tech mostly).

  3. RSS Small Creating Passionate Users

    4. Kathy Sierra has such a unique and counter-intuitive (yet somehow logical) take it stuns me. It also doesn’t hurt that she uses lots of diagrams and pictures, either :P

  4. RSS Small Kim’s Blog

    5. Kim exposes me to stuff I like to know, but don’t otherwise have the need to learn. Even better, her posts are always fun, and written in good spirit.

Totally Off Topic

A man is not a camel, and neither is he all work. Here are the random blogs I always read.

  1. RSS Small Qwerty Concepts

    2. Written by Bob Gladstein (aka qwerty on the forums), this leftwing take on life is always excellent, as Bob finds good stuff (like the Barack Obama Selma Alabama speech) and always makes insightful, thought provoking comments.

  2. RSS Small The Freakonomics Blog

    3. Freakonomics deals with the economics of daily life, and featuires interesting tidbits on a range of strange topics, like why people do what they do and the affects of race and other factors on a peson’s life. Sometomes controversial, Freakonomics forces me to look at the world differently.

  3. RSS Small The Superficial

    4. With the tagline “Becuase You’re Ugly”, The Superficial is a bunch of sexist and politically incorrect comments as an excuse to look at the beautiful people. Not for the easily offended, The Superficial is part funny, part nasty, and features a lot of course language.

    I think this quote from The Superficial (that made me spit coffee at my monitor) is a typical example (and good place to finish):

    Tom Brady may have impregnated Gisele Bundchen

    …the report says she may have already told friends and family. The news comes just weeks after Brady’s ex, Bridget Moynahan, said she was pregnant with his child.

    I always knew I hated Tom Brady I just wasn’t sure why. I mean, yeah, he ran over my dog with his car and punched my mom in the stomach, but knocking up Gisele? It just got personal, man.”