Do me a favor.
Numerous bloggers have made their bloglist files available for the rest of us,
inviting us to subscribe to the same blogs that they do. Though I can well understand
the positive intent behind this, I think that such a philanthropic act is not only ill-advised, but even
counter-productive. It seems to go against a very basic tenet of the blogosphere, a tenet that seems to saythere's no way that everybody is going to see everything, so each of us should keep our eyes on a few interesting, and different, items. If we report to each other, via our blogs, what we've found that's worth passing on, we'll be doing everybody a service.
I don't think I've ever found a statement such as this explicitly elucidated, but it makes sense to me that most bloggers have a gut understanding of it.
This is why I found it rather strange when, a couple of months ago, Edublogger
Ewan McIntosh offered
up his list of feeds for others to download and place in their feed readers:
I was Skyping with Andrew Pass today about what blogs we read and it got me thinking that there must be a lot of people out there with interesting reading habits. Being the kind of free and easy guy I am I thought I would give a gift to all the 'power readers' out there and hand over my current OPML files. These are data files you can import to your Bloglines account and then receive all the same articles I do. I've grouped them so that you can get into the stuff you're most interested in.
It's a bit of a gamble, of course, when your business is in having know-how - and a large part of my know-how comes from the folk in these OPML files, of course. But the best part of my job is sharing what I find and this is a very efficient way to do that. Let me know if this is helpful. If so, I'll make a point of adding them to the sidebar and updating as often as I can.
This post produced only a handful of responses, but they were very positive, thanking
McIntosh for the service he provided. This in itself is rather strange, considering
that finding blogs that are worth following is incredibly easy. "Major" bloggers
on a certain topic have blogrolls on their blogs that link to many more blogs
than someone might want to visit. But a discussion of where to find more blogs
worth subscribing to skirts the main issue - we don't all want to be reading the
same things, but instead offering a wide variety of items from an even wider array
of perspectives. That being the case, don't offer me your OPML file. Please, do
some editing for me instead.
Go to: Now. Right now!