When to Unsubscribe

Bloglines is a program which lets you subscribe to various blogs of your choice. Initially, you set up a list of blogs, and then the program automatically tells you whether anything new entries have been written since you last opened the list.

I made up my subscription list about half a year ago, and at any one time, I read the entries to 20-30 blogs daily, but only about 10 of them remain constant on my list. The other ten to twenty blogs vary according to whether or not their content can hold my interest and whether the bloggers’ behaviour is acceptable to my sensitivities. Indeed, sometimes the bloggers just decide to stop blogging, but mostly, if the content of the blog posts steps over one of my “trash” borderlines, and then I unsubscribe (i.e., delete key) the blog from the list.

Here is a list of my trash borderlines:

• A blogger proudly announces that he is a staunch conservative from way on back and, as far as he is concerned, there shouldn’t be any gun control in the States: the more gun carriers, the merrier. (Trash factor: immediate)

• The blog has so many co-authors that every day’s input on just one blog is ten to twenty posts. I just reallyreally don’t have the time to wade through all that stuff. The information I gather from reading blogs doesn’t replace proper news sites. What I do, as in the case of the Huffington Post blog, is to just keep monitoring one or two bloggers on the blogs list. (Trash factor: over a longer period of time).

• With personal blogs of people I do not know, but whose ideas and daily occurrences I find interesting, there are three faux pas they shouldn’t transgress. First, start lamenting about the weather (admittedly a transgression I have been occasionally guilty of). Become obsessed about their health, or lack of: this includes both mental and physical health (I really don’t want to know how many forms of Prosac there are in this world). In the case of foreigners-living-in-other-countries blogs, when the only character descriptions of people you encounter in the blogger’s entries are those of people who are stupid, rude, or lazy, then something has gone wrong with the blogger’s perspective. (Trash factor: give it a while, for anyone can lose their way, yet rest assured, when the point comes you’ll know).

• With personal blogs of friends and family members: if you find out disturbing, critical or intimate details of their lives and they haven’t bothered to communicate these facts to you directly, there is something intrinsically wrong in your relationship, and no vicarious acquirement of facts is going to change this. (Trash factor: immediate).