Blogs and Friendship

Since the beginning of the year, I have been trying to organize areas of my life a bit better. One area that I started to organize was my digital photos, Internet favorites, and blog subscriptions.

Although I’m not very good at it, I love to take pictures. I’m pretty good about getting the pictures from my camera to my laptop to a folder.  Other than that, it’s just a bunch of pictures that I seldom go back and look at or do anything with for that matter. So I decided to organize my pictures by creating folders for each type of event (i.e. - vacation), and then I created subcategories within each folder (i.e. - Hawaii).  Then to really get organized, I went through each picture and deleted the ‘not so good’ pics.

My Internet favorites was a bit more daunting task since I have tons of favorites! Soon after I started going through them, I realized a lot of the links were outdated or the links were no longer valid. From looking over my favorites list, I realize that ‘my favorites’ are applicable to whatever phase I was going through at a certain period in my life (house hunting, tattoos, hobbies, etc.). Now, onto the blogs…

Organizing my blog subscriptions was the hardest for me. I’ll admit that I have (OK, HAD) over 50 different blogs that I am (was) following. And if you’re a blog follower, you already know that’s a lot of content to read. Especially since some bloggers are more active than other bloggers. (I have a few bloggers that I love to read who post two or three times a day! Maybe one day I’ll get to that level.)

For me, unsubscribing to some of my blogs was kind of like saying good bye to a friend. Once I begin following a blog, I begin to feel like I know the person in a cyberspace kind of sense. I look forward to hearing what happens next in their lives.  And similar to the real world, the friendship continues to develop in some way or it ends for one reason or another.

So, I started going through my list of blog subscriptions in Google Reader.  If I came across a blog and the blogger hadn’t posted anything in 4 – 6 months, I stopped following the blog. This was the hardest for me – selecting unsubscribe.  Especially since before the past 30 days, I was one of ‘those’ bloggers who posted very sporadically. Now I have a greater appreciation for my followers and making certain I keep you in the know.

Now, the ‘4 – 6 months’ timeframe wasn’t a hard and fast rule. Some of the blogs I follow are 3-Day bloggers. These bloggers only blog about the 3-Day so I don’t expect them to blog all year long (although it sometimes feels like the 3-Day should be a never ending event). To be honest, I don’t have expectations for anyone to blog every day since I don’t have time to read blogs every day. I just want you to be there when I need you. Just like a real friendship.