The CBC has a story about a study that points to habitual use of blogs … that is, where instead of perusing their contents, you’re checking them obsessively to see if there have been any updates. You know, like e-mail. Or, if you’re like me, web analytics and Digg counts. (Say, one of my Noise to Signal cartoons got over a hundred Diggs lately! I wonder how high the total is right now…? But I digress.)
The researchers found that habitual blog readers are more interested in the latest blog posts than in the archives; that the fact a post is the newest one on a blog is more important to them than just how new it is; and that readers aren’t all that concerned about missing a few posts:
“Some would eventually catch up on old posts when the time suited them, while others simply choose the more recent or most interesting posts to read, skipping the rest,” the researchers wrote. “This attitude challenges the commonly accepted notion that users feel overwhelmed with staying constantly up to date.”
It strikes me that there’s a technology perfectly suited to that approach, and it’s baked right into most blogs: RSS. It not only allows you to see instantly which of a blog’s posts and comments are the most recent, it lets you get that information for 10, 100 or 1,000 blogs at once (through the miracle of a newsreader like NetNewsWire, Bloglines or Google Reader). It is to blog reading as the funnel-and-length-of-hose is to excessive beer drinking. (Odds that this comparison will ever show up on your SATs? Nil.)
