I read blogs / web journals...

[tye]

many and often

 43/13%

a few, often

 81/25%

not often, rarely the same ones

 29/9%

a few, infrequently

 66/20%

not any more

 8/2%

only by coincidence

 70/21%

over my dead body

 33/10%

330 total votes

[tbone1]

One, occaisionally.

My wife once told me that I should write a blog. She told me this after a day where I'd worked my backside off for about fourteen hours cutting down the honey-do list. I looked at her with one eye, because I couldn't manage to open two, and said "Hon, I have no time to read a blog, let alone write one."

[davorg]

What do people do on a computer all day if it's not reading blogs :)

I currently have 199 RSS subscriptions in my Bloglines account. They aren't all blogs, but probably the majority are. I should probably cut back.

[Aristotle]

If there was a really good, useful newsfeed for PerlMonks, I might read the place more… :-)

$ grep -c xmlUrl .liferea/feedlist.opml 
409

Most are low-volume and about 20 are in the “Bin” folder, where long-standing subscriptions go to die. But that’s where all the time goes that I used to spend almost exclusively on PerlMonks for a few years.

Unfortunately threads, particularly Usenet-style nested threads, don’t map very well to feeds, no matter how you arrange the setup. Maybe I should write the PerlMonks ↔ email gateway I always thought about. (Since I also skim about 30 mailing lists; but ⅔ of those having low traffic.) The question is how to handle voting and moderation, though, which I never resolved.

[stonecolddevin]

Most blogs i run into are political blather, or just rantings, that I typically disagree with. I read a blog on guns one time, a lady had some very skewed opinions on the guns she liked and the reasons why. People like to write about things before they actually understand why they're the way they are, and it really just irks me.

I find reading blogs just adds stress to my day and doesn't really inform me of, well, anything :-)

[planetscape]

Generally only when they appear in a Google (or other) search, and the context is compelling enough to make me think the hit is actually relevant. And then I am usually disappointed.

[Skeeve]

dito

So my vote was "over my dead body". I actually find no satisfaction in reading other people's "diaries". I have a life of my own. (At least I really do hope that I have)

[margulies]

Just when someone sends me a link, or shows me something interesting.

Usually I don't go out to find them by myself.

[wolfger]

A few, often; many, infrequently; hundreds, by coincidence.

Really, it depends on your definitions of "few", "many", and "blog". Is Slashdot a blog? Some people think Wikipedia is. And how many is "many"? More than 3? 5? 10?

[jonadab]

Is Slashdot a blog?

I would call slashdot one of the earliest and most influential blogs, although the fact that they publish reader-submitted stories (not just comments on the stories) does set it apart a bit from most others. Nonetheless, the content is very bloggish. Wikipedia, OTOH, has very unbloggish content, for the most part (excepting the Talk pages and a handful of special pages, but these are none of them the focus of the site).

Perhaps the more interesting question is, is Perlmonks a blog? I mean, yes, the subject matter is technical, but surely there are blogs with highly technical subject matter (e.g., In The Pipeline is clearly a blog, and organic chemistry is every bit as technical as Perl, or at least would appear so to the layman), so I don't think that alone can exclude it.

[rinceWind]

Interestingly enough, my employers seem to regard Perlmonks as a blog.

I recently posted to a recent thread on consultancies, where I named and linked to my employers' website. I received a call from my manager, who it seems had received a call from the corporate blog police. Apparently, there are guidelines about what individuals are allowed to say when posting to their own blogs. This was news to my manager too. I wasn't saying anything bad about my employer, quite the contrary in fact.

The simple resolution was to remove references to the company name of my consultancy, and remove the web link. It was probably through http_referer that they picked up the reference.

[tedv]

Much like Perl, English is context sensitive. Things like "few" and "many" are relative frequencies to other possible activities you do. To someone who reads a lot of stuff on the web, a "few" blogs might be 5. But to someone who reads almost nothing 5 would be "many".

That's okay!

The purpose of the poll isn't to quantify the number of blogs people read. (If it were, the poll would list numeric options.) Rather it's objective is to measure the perception of the relative personal importance of blogs among the monks. "How many people feel like they read a few versus many?" is fundamentally a question of feelings, not metrics.

[syphilis]

Wow!!! ... how could you tell that my body was dead ?

Cheers,
Rob

[bart]

Yes, I read a lot of blogs, but there are very few that I actively follow. Most of the blogs I read are pointed out to me by social news sites, such as reddit.com.

I do look at almost every journal on use.perl.org.

[Moriarty]

If I happen to stumble upon one that looks interesting, and happen to have some spare time (whatever that is), I may read a little of a blog, but I definitely don't go out of my way to find them.

[larsen]

This brings the question: what Perl-related blogs do you recommend?

[davorg]

what Perl-related blogs do you recommend?

Planet Perl would be a good start. And then there's also Planet Perl Six.

[greatshots]

BBS-bestBlogSite

[sgt]

I follow mostly blogs about Perl and Perl6.

cheers --stephan

[CaMelRyder]

Seriously, I hate them

[CaMelRyder]

Up with hope, down with blogs.